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This article defends the thesis that Kantian observations on the problem of races in the Theory of the Heavens are linked to an unexplained set of research principles consistent with empirical facts that support in this work the conjectures about Solar System's inhabitants. To this end, it will first be shown that this particular point has gone entirely unnoticed by Kantsforschung. Then, it will be indicated that Kantian procedure dialogues straight with Fontenelle's argument in his famous text Digression sur les anciens et les modernes. Finally, it will be demonstrated the advances that young Kant extracted from the research of his predecessor and that were used as guidelines for empirical examination of racial diversity in his new Lectures on Physical Geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the nature of Kant's anthropological investigation, carried out during his courses of Physical Geography. Even though one cannot dispute his relationship with empirical physics, the incorporation of both objects of inner sense (soul and human being) in his cosmological approach of the empirical investigation of human nature raises questions regarding disciplinary articulations (between empirical physics, physical geography, empirical psychology, and anthropology) and methodological articulations (between speculation and pragmatism), upon which he builds his Knowledge of the World. I shall demonstrate that, from the beginning, Kant sought to systematically combine different scientific procedures focused on the knowledge of human nature, and that this is precisely the reason why he uses soul as an ontological concept in his geographic studies to clarify the diversity of tastes and tempers of the human species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]