Kantův kriticismus a pražské přednášky z estetiky Johanna Heinricha Dambecka

This essay refutes the widely held view that the aesthetics lectures given by Johann Heinrich Dambeck (1774–1820), a professor ordinarius at Prague, were essentially Kantian. The first part discusses the errors that have led to this view. The second part, the core of the essay, considers examples of the Kantian viewpoints that Petr Vít, in his works in the 1980s, selected from a published version of Dambeck’s lectures and compares them with ideas expressed in Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790). The essay then expands the comparison to include all places where Kant’s name and works appear in the Dambeck publication. The last part of the essay compares these places with the MS version of Dambeck’s lectures. The comparison seeks to demonstrate that neither of these versions can rightly be called purely Kantian, because although they are repeatedly mentioned in Dambeck’s works, Kant’s views are not generally shared or even developed in them.