Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher. Born in Königsberg in the Kingdom of Prussia, he is considered one of the central thinkers of the Enlightenment. His comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and highly discussed figures in modern Western philosophy.
In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition " that structure all experience and that the objects of experience are mere "appearances". The nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us. Nonetheless, in an attempt to counter the philosophical doctrine of skepticism, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason, his best-known work. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican Revolution in his proposal to think of the objects of experience as conforming to people's spatial and temporal forms of intuition and the categories of their understanding so that they have a priori cognition of those objects.
Kant believed that reason is the source of morality and that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's religious views were deeply connected to his moral theory. Their exact nature remains in dispute. He hoped that perpetual peace could be secured through an international federation of republican states and international cooperation. His cosmopolitan reputation is called into question by his promulgation of scientific racism for much of his career, although he altered his views on the subject in the last decade of his life.
Early life
Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran faith in Königsberg in East Prussia. His mother, Anna Regina Reuter, was born in Königsberg to a father from Nuremberg. Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant, was a German harness-maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city. Kant believed his family to be of Scottish descent, although this has not been verified by genealogical research.Kant was baptized as Emanuel, changing the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew. He was the fourth of nine children. The Kant household stressed the Pietist values of religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. Immanuel Kant's early education was strict, punitive, and highly disciplinary, with an emphasis on Latin and religious instruction rather than mathematics and science. In his later years, Kant lived a strictly ordered life. It was said that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. Kant considered marriage two times, first a widow and then a Westphalian girl, but both times waited too long. Though he never married, he seems to have had a rewarding social life; he was a popular teacher as well as a modestly successful author, even before starting on his major philosophical works.
Young scholar
Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum, from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he would later remain for the rest of his professional life. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen, a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded negatively. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the Critique of Pure Reason was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism. Kant had contacts with students, colleagues, friends and diners who frequented the local Masonic lodge. His main publisher, Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, was also a Freemason.His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748; he would return there in August 1754. He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces.
Early work
Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down the Earth's spin. He also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with the Earth's rotation. The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture at the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic, and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the Coriolis force.In 1756, Kant also published three papers on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Kant's theory, which involved shifts in huge caverns filled with hot gases, though inaccurate, was one of the first systematic attempts to explain earthquakes in natural rather than supernatural terms. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography, making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and, in 1802, a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, Physical Geography, was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics, and anthropology, along with other topics.
In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms.
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, he produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime; he was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality. In 1766 Kant wrote a critical piece on Emanuel Swedenborg's Dreams of a Spirit-Seer.
In 1770, Kant was appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World. This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.
While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.
Publication of the ''Critique of Pure Reason''
At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledgethat is, reasoned knowledgethese two being related but having very different processes. Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a "" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy. Hume, in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature, had argued that people know the mind only through a subjective, essentially illusory series of perceptions. Ideas such as causality, morality, and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason, printed by Johann Friedrich Hartknoch. Kant countered Hume's empiricism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori, and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality. Perhaps the most direct contested matter was Hume's argument against any necessary connection between causal events, which Hume characterized as the "cement of the universe". In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues for what he takes to be the a priori justification of such necessary connection.Although now recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, the Critique disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. Kant was quite upset with its reception. His former student Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism by itself instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality. Similarly to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, he rejected Kant's position that space and time possess a form that can be analyzed. Garve and Feder also faulted the Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded the first Critique. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz, a professor of mathematics, published Explanations of Professor Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ; and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science from 1786. Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the pantheism controversy. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to an accusation of atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason. Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.