Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (1724 to 1804) was a German philosopher, born in Königsberg in the Kingdom of Prussia, and is considered one of the central thinkers of the Enlightenment. His systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, political theory and the philosophy of religion made him one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787) he argued for transcendental idealism, the doctrine that space and time are forms of intuition that structure all experience, so that we know only appearances and not things in themselves. He held that reason is the source of morality and that the categorical imperative binds all rational agents, and he hoped that perpetual peace could be secured through an international federation of republican states. He studied the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff at the University of Königsberg under Martin Knutzen, who introduced him to the physics of Isaac Newton, and he remained at that university for the rest of his professional life. He never married and lived a strictly ordered life.