Immanuel Kant

German Enlightenment philosopher (1724–1804), born, who lived and died in Königsberg, East Prussia, never venturing more than a few kilometres away throughout eighty years of a proverbially regular life — it is said that neighbours set their clocks by his evening walks — yet one marked by an intellectual revolution unmatched in the history of philosophy. Awakened, by his own admission, from his 'dogmatic slumber' by reading Hume, he undertook in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) the project of determining the limits and conditions of possibility of all human knowledge: his 'Copernican revolution' consists in reversing the traditional relationship between mind and world, holding that it is not the mind that conforms to reality but reality, as we know it, that conforms to the a priori structures of our sensibility (space and time) and our understanding (the categories), such that we can never know things 'in themselves' but only as appearances. In the Critique of Practical Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals he developed a deontological ethics centred on the categorical imperative — 'act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law' — which makes the good will, not consequences, the foundation of morality, and which demands that every person always be treated as an end in themselves, never merely as a means. He also wrote on aesthetics (Critique of Judgment), politics (Perpetual Peace, a forerunner of international organisations) and religion, and his work marks the dividing line between modern philosophy and all subsequent philosophy, which is, in a real sense, either Kantian or post-Kantian.

What are Immanuel Kant's main ideas?What is Immanuel Kant's most important work?How would you summarize Immanuel Kant's thought?

20 works

← All authors