Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a German Prussian philosopher, generally regarded as the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment period, having a major impact on the Romantic and Idealist philosophies of the 19th Century, and as one of history's most influential thinkers. Kant is most famous for his ideas on transcendental idealism that we bring innate forms and concepts to the raw experience of the world, which otherwise would be completely unknowable. Kant's philosophy of nature and human nature was both immediately controversial and very durable in its influence. Kant provided both a summation of many of the currents of his own time, and a challenge for philosophy in the future to connect rational with empirical and moral philosophy.

Kant was born, lived and died in Königsberg (at the time a town in Prussia; today it is the town of Kaliningrad in Russia). He spent much of his youth as a solid, albeit unspectacular, student living more off playing pool than his writings. He lived a much regulated life: the walk he took at three-thirty every afternoon was so punctual that local housewives would set their clocks by him. He never married and he owned only one piece of art in his household, advocating the absence of passion in favor of logic so that he may better serve. He never left Prussia, and rarely stepped outside his own home town. However, despite his reputation of being a solitary man, he was considered a very sociable person: he would regularly have guests over for dinner, insisting that sociable company was good for his constitution, as was laughter. Kant was a respected and competent university professor for most of his life, although he was in his late fifties before he did anything that would bring him historical repute.

He entered the local university in 1740, and studied the philosophy of Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutsen, a follower of Wolff. He also studied the then new mathematics of Sir Isaac Newton. In 1746 he wrote a paper on measurement, reflecting Leibniz's influence. Different scholars hold different views on the importance of each of these aspects, for Paul Guyer, and many others, it is rationalism which is the most important element - in this view Kant is seen as a philosopher, like many others.

In 1755 he became a private lecturer at the University, and while there published "Inquiry into the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals", where he examined the