Kant, Immanuel 1724-1804
German philosopher

The son of a saddler, he was born in K�nigsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), and stayed there all his life. He studied and then taught at the university, becoming Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in 1770. He lived a quiet, orderly life and local people were said to set their watches by the time of his daily walk. His early publications were in the natural sciences, particularly geophysics and astronomy, and in an essay on Newtonian cosmology (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels, 1755) he anticipated the nebular theory of Pierre Laplace and predicted the existence of the planet Uranus before its actual discovery by William Herschel in 1781. He published extensively, but his most important works were produced relatively late in his life: the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, 'Critique of Pure Reason'), Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788, 'Critique of Practical Reason'), and Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790, 'Critique of Judgement'). The first of these is a philosophical classic, albeit very difficult, which he himself described as 'dry, obscure, contrary to all ordinary ideas, and prolix to boot'. In it he responds to David Hume's empiricism and argues that the immediate objects of perception depend not only on our sensations but also on our perceptual equipment, which orders and structures those sensations into intelligible unities. He likened his conclusions to a Copernican revolution in philosophy, whereby some of the properties we observe in objects are due to the nature of the observer, rather than the objects themselves. There exist basic concepts (or 'categories'), like cause and effect, which are not learned from experience but constitute our basic conceptual apparatus for making sense of experience and the world. The second Critique deals with ethics, and his views are developed in the Grundlagen zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785, 'Groundwork to the Metaphysic of Morals') where he presents the famous Categorical Imperative, 'Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will to become a universal law'. The third Critique deals with aesthetics or judgments of 'taste', for which he tries to provide an objective basis and which he connects with our ability to recognize 'purposiveness' in nature. He also wrote on political topics, and his Perpetual Peace (1795) advocates a world system of free states. Kant described his philosophy as 'transcendental' or 'critical' idealism, and he exerted an enormous influence on subsequent philosophy, especially the idealism of Johann Fichte, Hegel and Friedrich von Schelling. He is regarded as one of the great figures in the history of western thought.

Bibliography: E Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought (1981)