Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy. He was born in Königsberg, a city in Prussia (now part of Russia), and spent his entire life there. He studied at the University of Königsberg, where he later became a professor of logic and metaphysics. He never married or traveled far from his hometown. Kant's main philosophical project was to develop a system of transcendental idealism, which argues that space and time are mere forms of intuition that structure all experience, and that the objects of experience are mere appearances. The nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us. Kant aimed to overcome the skepticism and rationalism of his predecessors by showing that human reason has limits, but also that it can provide a basis for morality and aesthetics. Kant's most famous work is the Critique of Pure Reason (1781,1787), in which he attempted to establish the foundations of human knowledge and to answer the question: what can we know? He argued that we can only know the phenomena (the appearances of things), not the noumena (the things in themselves). He also distinguished between analytic judgments (those that are true by definition) and synthetic judgments (those that add new information). He claimed that there are some synthetic judgments that are a priori (known independently of experience), such as the principles of mathematics and natural science. These judgments are possible because they are based on the categories, the pure concepts of the understanding that apply to all objects of experience. Kant also wrote two other major works: the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), in which he developed his moral philosophy based on the concept of the categorical imperative, a universal law that commands us to act according to our duty; and the Critique of Judgment (1790), in which he explored the nature and validity of aesthetic and teleological judgments. In addition, he wrote several essays on religion, politics, history, and education. Kant's philosophy had a profound impact on subsequent thinkers, especially the German idealists such as Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, who developed his ideas in different directions. He also influenced many other fields of thought, such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and theology. Kant is widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time.