Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant reset the terms of Western philosophy and never travelled more than about a hundred miles from the town where he was born. Born in Königsberg in Prussia in 1724, the fourth of nine children of a harness maker, he was raised in a strict Pietist household and educated at the university there, where he spent his entire career. He worked as a private tutor for years and became a full professor only at forty-six. His first period produced work in physics and astronomy, including a nebular hypothesis for the formation of the solar system that anticipated Laplace. He then read Hume and was, as he put it, woken from his dogmatic slumber. Hume had argued that causation cannot be found in experience. Kant's answer, worked out over a silent decade and published as the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, was that the mind is not a passive receiver: space, time and causality are the forms it imposes on experience. We can therefore have certain knowledge of the world as it appears, and none at all of things as they are in themselves. He called this his Copernican revolution. The Critique of Practical Reason and the Groundwork set out the categorical imperative: act only on a maxim you could will to be a universal law, and treat people always as ends and never merely as means. The Critique of Judgment covers beauty and purpose in nature. He wrote on perpetual peace, proposing a federation of republics, and defined enlightenment as emergence from self-imposed immaturity. His daily walk was said to be so regular that neighbours set their clocks by it. He died in 1804.

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