Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was one of the most important thinkers in modern philosophy. He has had a significant impact on many areas of thought, including epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, laying the groundwork for much of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy.
He continues to have a significant influence today in fields such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. The basic idea of Kant’s “critical philosophy” was human autonomy – particularly in his three critiques: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and the Critique of Judgment (1790).
Kant was born into a family of craftsmen with modest means. Kant’s parents were Pietists, and he attended a Pietist school, the Collegium Fridericianum, from the age of eight through fifteen. Pietism was an evangelical Lutheran movement that emphasized the need for conversion, reliance on divine grace, the experience of religious emotions, and personal devotion. Responding violently to the forced soul-searching he was subjected to at the Collegium Fridericianum, Kant sought refuge in the Latin classics, which were central to the school’s curriculum.
Kant initially developed an interest in classics at the University of Königsberg, but he soon became interested in philosophy, which was the focus of first year students’ studies. This encompassed mathematics and physics as well as logic, metaphysics, ethics, and natural law. Kant’s philosophy professors introduced him to the critical synthesis of the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz, which was then very influential in German universities. Kant was exposed to a wide range of German and British critics Aristotelianism and Pietism represented in the faculty of philosophy.
Kant’s favorite teacher was Martin Knutzen, a Pietist who was heavily influenced by both Wolff and the English philosopher John Locke. Knutzen was a skilled teacher who helped Kant develop his philosophical thinking. Knutzen introduced Kant to the work of Isaac Newton, and Newton’s influence can be seen in Kant’s first published work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (1747). This critical attempt to mediate a dispute in natural philosophy between Leibnizians and Newtonians over the proper measurement of force is a result of Kant’s exposure to Newton’s work.
In the 1750s, he published three scientific works – one of which, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), was a major book in which he developed what later became known as the nebular hypothesis about the formation of the solar system.
Kant produced a large number of philosophical works in 1762-1764, including five. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (1762) reviews criticisms of Aristotelian logic that were developed by other German philosophers. The only argument that could be used to demonstrate the existence of God is a major book in which Kant drew on his earlier work in Universal History and New Elucidation to develop an original argument for God’s existence as a necessary condition for the internal possibility of all things. He then criticizes other arguments for God’s existence.
Between 1770 and 1781, Kant spent a decade working on the Critique of Pure Reason. However, he published nothing else of significance during this time. The publication of Kant’s work in 1781 marked the beginning of a new burst of activity that led to his most important and enduring works.
Among the major books that rapidly followed Kant’s work were the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant’s main work on the fundamental principle of morality; the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), his main work on natural philosophy in what scholars call his critical period (1781–1798); the second and substantially revised edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787); the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), a fuller discussion of topics in moral philosophy that builds on (and in some ways revises) the Groundwork; and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), which deals with aesthetics and teleology.
With Kant’s work, he became well-known and influential internationally in the late 1780s. However, in 1790, he announced that he had completed his critical enterprise with the Critique of the Power of Judgment.
After retiring in 1796, he came to believe that there was a gap in this system separating the metaphysical foundations of natural science from physics itself, and he set out to close this gap in a series of notes that postulate the existence of an ether or caloric matter. There is much debate surrounding the Opus Postumum, which were unfinished and unpublished pieces by Kant. Scholars disagree on their significance and relation to his earlier work.
It is clear that some of the late notes in Kant’s work show unmistakable signs of his mental decline, which became tragically precipitous around 1800. Kant died on February 12, 1804.
