Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (April 22, 1724 – February 12, 1804) was a German philosopher and scientist (astrophysics, mathematics, geography, anthropology) from East Prussia, generally regarded as one of Western society's and modern Europe's most influential thinkers and the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment. Kant defined the Enlightenment, in the essay "", as an age shaped by the motto, "Dare to know". This involved thinking autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. Kant's work served as a bridge between the Rationalist and Empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers.

Biography

Immanuel Kant was born, lived and died in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, a city which today is Kaliningrad in the Russian exclave of that name; his father was a German craftsman. His parents baptized him as Emanuel Kant, which he later, after learning Hebrew, changed to Immanuel. He spent much of his youth as a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. Contrary to the dour image of him promoted by early biographers, Kant as a young man was quite gregarious and enjoyed attending social events about town. He also regularly invited guests over for dinner, insisting that company and laughter were good for his constitution. It was only after befriending the English merchant Joseph Green, who instilled in Kant a respect for living according to strictly observed maxims of behaviour, that Kant began living a very regulated life: according to some stories neighbours would set their clocks according to the time Green and Kant finished their daily get-togethers. A biography of Kant by Manfred Kuehn even suggests that Kant was philosophically inspired by Green, who not only introduced him to the philosophy of David Hume, but whose personal habits may have influenced Kant in formulating his idea of the categorical imperative. http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=611077 Another influential view about the introduction of the works of Hume to Kant and other German philosophers, which finds its clearest expression in the works of Frederick C. Beiser, is that it was Johann Georg Hamann who brought Hume's views to Germany. For the remainder of his life Kant remained unmarried and owned only one piece of art in his household, advocating the absence of passion in favour of logic. He never left Prussia and rarely stepped outside his own home town. He was a respected and competent university professor for most of his life, although he was in his late fifties before he did anything that would bring him historical repute.

Related Topics:
Königsberg - East Prussia - Kaliningrad - Hebrew - Joseph Green - Maxims - Manfred Kuehn - David Hume - Categorical imperative - Frederick C. Beiser - Johann Georg Hamann - Professor

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He entered the local university in 1740, and studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutsen, a rationalist who was familiar with the developments of British philosophy and science. Knutsen introduced Kant to the new mathematics of Sir Isaac Newton and, in 1746, Kant wrote a paper on measurement, reflecting Leibniz's influence. In 1755, he became a private lecturer at the University, and while there published "Inquiry into the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals", where he examined the problem of having a logical system of philosophy that connected with the world of natural philosophy, a concern typical of the period. In this paper, he proposed what later become known as the Kant-Laplace theory of planetary formation, wherein the planets formed from rotating protoplanetary discs of gas (see solar nebula). Kant was also the first recorded scholar to postulate (as is true) that some of the faint nebulae one can see with a small telescope (or in one case, with the naked eye) were external galaxies or, as he called them, island universes. Kant's prescient remarks on island universes.

Related Topics:
1740 - Gottfried Leibniz - Christian Wolff - Martin Knutsen - Rationalist - Sir Isaac Newton - 1746 - 1755 - Period - Kant-Laplace theory - Planetary formation - Planet - Protoplanetary disc - Gas - Solar nebula - Nebula - Telescope - Galaxies

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In 1763, he wrote The Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of God's Existence, which questioned the ontological argument for God in the form it was advanced by René Descartes as well as the argument from design. Manfred Kuehn's summary of Kant's argument for the existence of God gives a sense of his metaphysical thinking during this pre-critical period, of the very sort of thinking that the "Critique of Pure Reason" would later argue could never lead to knowledge. Kant argues that the internal possibility of all things presupposes some existence or other. "Accordingly, there must be something whose nonexistence would cancel all internal possibility whatsoever. This is a necessary thing. Kant then tried to show that this necessary thing must have all the characteristics commonly ascribed to God. Therefore God necessarily exists. This a priori step in Kant's argument is followed by a step a posteriori, which was intended to establish the necessity of an absolutely necessary being. He argued that matter itself contains the principles that give rise to an ordered universe, and this, he thought, leads us to the concept of God as a Supreme Being, which 'embraces within itself everything which can be thought by man.' God includes all that is possible or real." (Manfred Kuehn, Kant: a biography, p. 140f.)

Related Topics:
1763 - Ontological argument - René Descartes - Metaphysical - A priori - A posteriori - Matter - Universe

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In 1766, he was appointed Second Librarian of the Prussian Royal Library, a prestigious government position. In 1770, he became a full professor at Königsberg. It was after this time that Hume's works began to have serious impact on his understanding of metaphysics though there is considerable evidence he had read Hume earlier and that it was only the breakdown of an early attempt at constructing a rationalist metaphysics that led him to see Hume's contribution to philosophy as decisive. Hume was fiercely empirical, scorned all metaphysics, and systematically debunked great quantities of it. His most famous thesis is that nothing in our experience can justify the assumption that there are "causal powers" inherent in things — that, for example, when one billiard ball strikes another, the second must move. Kant found Hume's conclusions unacceptable. "I wilfully admit that it was David Hume that woke me from my dogmatic slumber", he would later write.

Related Topics:
1766 - Prussian Royal Library - 1770

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For the next 10 years, he worked on the architecture of his own philosophy. In 1781, he released the Critique of Pure Reason, one of the most influential, widely cited, and widely disputed works in Western philosophy. He followed this with Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, then in 1788, the Critique of Practical Reason and in 1790, the Critique of Judgment. The effect was immediate in the German-speaking world, with readership including Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. But the attention was far from universally approving: on the contrary, almost every aspect of his writing was attacked and criticized fiercely, particularly his ideas on categories, the place of free will and determinism, and whether we can have knowledge of external reality. His early critics included Johann Schaumann, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Hermann Pistorius. Pistorius' criticisms were particularly influential and are still cited today.

Related Topics:
1781 - Critique of Pure Reason - Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals - 1788 - Critique of Practical Reason - 1790 - Critique of Judgment - Ludwig van Beethoven - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Free will - Determinism - Johann Schaumann - Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi - Hermann Pistorius

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The Critique of Practical Reason dealt with morality, or action, in the same way that the first Critique dealt with knowledge, and the Critique of Judgement dealt with the various uses of our mental powers that neither confer factual knowledge nor determine us to action, such as aesthetic judgement, for example of the beautiful and sublime, and teleological judgment, that is, construing things as having "purposes". As Kant understood them, aesthetic and teleological judgment connected our moral and empirical judgments to one another, unifying his system. Two shorter works, the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics and the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals treated the same matter as the first and second critiques respectively, in a more cursory form — assuming the answer and working backward, so to speak. They serve as his introductions to the critical system.

Related Topics:
Aesthetic - Sublime - Teleological - Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics

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The epistemological material of the first Critique was put into application in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science; the ethical dictums of the second were put into practice in Metaphysics of Morals. His work on moral philosophy is best known for its formulation of a basic tenet of ethics, sometimes falsely assumed to be an extension of the ethic of reciprocity (Golden Rule), which Kant called the categorical imperative: "Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

Related Topics:
Ethics - Ethic of reciprocity

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Kant also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, politics, and the application of philosophy to life. When he died in 1804, he was working on an incomplete manuscript that has been published as Opus Postumum.

Related Topics:
1804 - Opus Postumum

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His tomb and its pillared enclosure outside the cathedral in Königsberg is one of the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered East Prussia in 1945. A replica of a statue of Kant that stood in front of the university was donated by a German entity in 1991 and placed on the original pediment. Near his tomb is the following inscription in Russian and German, taken from the "Conclusion" of his Critique of Practical Reason :

Related Topics:
Tomb - Pillar - Soviets - 1945 - 1991

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:Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and perseveringly my thinking engages itself with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

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