Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) is a German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), who researches, lectures, and writes on philosophy and anthropology during the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century.

At the time, there are major successes and advances in the sciences (for example, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) applying reason and logic.

Kant’s major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aims to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he takes to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics.

He hopes to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience are used to support what he sees as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume.

He states: "It always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us ... should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof."

("Transcendental Arguments (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)".

Plato.stanford.edu.

2011-02-25.

Retrieved 2012-05-31.

Kant proposes a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that: "Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but ... let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition."

(Rohlf, Michael, "Immanuel Kant", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.))

Kant publishes other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history.

These include the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797), which deals with ethics, and the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology.

He aims to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches.

The former asserts that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintains that reason and innate ideas are prior.

Kant argues that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason.

He also says that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions.

The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual is both a theme of the Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of philosophy.

His ideas influence many thinkers in Germany during his lifetime.

He settles and moves philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists.

The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer amend and develop the Kantian system, thus bringing about various forms of German idealism.

He is seen as a major figure in the history and development of philosophy.

German and European thinking progressed after his time, and his influence still inspires philosophical work today.

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