Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a German philosopher of the Enlightenment whose work transformed the study of knowledge, ethics and beauty. Born in Königsberg, Prussia, to a devout Pietist family, he spent nearly his whole life there, becoming professor of logic and metaphysics at its university in 1770. Reading David Hume, he said, woke him from his “dogmatic slumber,” and after a decade of quiet labor he published the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), followed by the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and the Critique of Judgment (1790). His moral philosophy centers on duty and the categorical imperative: act only on principles one could will as universal law, and treat every person as an end, never merely as a means. He wrote that “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” filled him with awe.
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Western Philosophy from Augustine to Kant
Augustine of Hippo drew on Platonic philosophy to frame Christian thought, and Thomas Aquinas later united Christian theology with the philosophy of Aristotle. In the seventeenth century, René Descartes made methodical doubt the starting point of modern philosophy, Blaise Pascal explored the limits of reason, and John Locke grounded knowledge in experience. Immanuel Kant then sought to reconcile these rationalist and empiricist traditions.
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