Immanuel Kant
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Immanuel Kant (April 22, 1724 - February 12, 1804) was a German philosopher. He was born in Königsberg, Prussia, and also died there. Kant studied philosophy in the university there, and later became a professor of philosophy.
Today the town Königsberg belongs to Russia, and is renamed Kaliningrad, but in his time it was the second largest city in the kingdom of Prussia. Kant was born to a family of Lutherans and went to a Lutheran-run school. In 1740 he entered Königsberg university and studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and his follower Christian Wolff. Kant was especially interested in the new physics theory of Isaac Newton.
After finishing his study in the university, Kant hoped to be a teacher of philosophy, but it was very difficult. He should have lived a life of private lecturer for a long time. Once, a chance to be a professor of poetry in Königsberg university was given to Kant, but he turned it down. Later in 1770 he became a full professor of philosophy in Königsberg university.
Young Kant was interested in physics, both of heavenly bodies and the earth. He wrote some papers about this, but his concern for metaphysics grew. He was eager to learn the nature of human experience: how humans could know something, and what their knowledge was based on.
Under the strong influence of the philosophical system of Leibniz and Wolff, Kant began to doubt the basic answers of past philosophers. Then Kant read a Scottish philosopher, David Hume. Hume had tried to make clear what our experience had been, and had reached a very strong opinion called "skepticism", that there was nothing to make our experience sure. Kant was very shocked by Hume, and saw the theory he had learned in a new point of view, then he began to try finding a third way other than the two that Kant called "skepticism" and "dogmaticism".
Kant read another thinker, named Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His thought on human beings, especially on moral and human freedom, impressed Kant.
Today we call Kantian philosophy "critical philosophy". Some scholars like to include him as one of the German idealists, but Kant himself didn't like to belong to that group. The most known work of Kant is the book Critique of the pure reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) that Kant published in 1781. Kant called his way of thought "critique", not philosophy. Kant said that critique was a preparation for establishment of real philosophy. According to Kant, for that establishment, people should know what human reason can do and which limits it has. In Critique of the pure reason Kant wrote several limits of human reason, to both feeling and thinking something. For sensation, there are two limits inside of human reason: space and time. There are no physical objects, but the limitations of our mind that work whenever we feel something through our senses. For thinking, he said there are twelve categories or pure rational concepts, divided into four fields: quantity, quality, relation and modalation. Kant thought human reason applied those ideas to everything.
But then, is what we think only our fantasy? Kant said no, although without those sensual and rational limitations, we can think nothing, then Kant was convinced there would be something we couldn't know directly behind our limitations, and even with limitations we could know something. It can not be a personal fantasy either, since those limitations were common to all human reason before our particular experience. Kant called what we couldn't know directly Ding an sich -- "thing itself". We can think "thing itself" but cannot have any experience about it, nor know it. God, the eternity of soul, life after death, such things belong to "thing itself", so they were not right objects of philosophy according to Kant, although people had liked to discuss them from ancient times.
Kant wrote two other books named Critique too: Critique of the practical reason(1788) and Critique of the Judgement(1790). In Critique of the practical reason Kant wrote about the problem of freedom and God. It was his main work of ethics. In Critique of the Judgement Kant wrote about beauty and teleology, or the problem if there was a purpose in general, if the world, a living creature had a reason to exist, and so on. In both books, Kant said we couldn't answer those problems, because they were concerned with "thing itself".
Kant gave a great influence to younger generations in his time. German thinkers like Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and writers like Helder, Schiller, and Goethe respected Kant very much. They believed they could make Kant's theory better, though Kant disagreed with them.
In the early 20th century Kant's theory was remembered again, and there was a group of German philosophers called New-kantinism. One of them, Windelband, said, "every philosophy before Kant poured into Kant, and every philosophy after Kant pours from Kant". Today the thoughts of Kant influence modern thinkers like Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, and so on.
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