Immanuel Kant

Lore & Background

Kant believed that reason is the source of morality and that the categorical imperative binds all rational agents. He believed that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant hoped that perpetual peace could be secured through an international federation of republican states and international cooperation. Kant believed that true religion is grounded on morality. The exact nature of his religious views is a matter of dispute.

Reader's Guide

Kant first attended the Collegium Fridericianum, from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he would later remain for the rest of his professional life. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen, a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton.

Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as 'the pillow for the lazy mind'. He also dissuaded Kant from idealism. His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748; he would return there in August 1754.

He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (written in 1745–1747). During the Russian occupation of Königsberg during the Seven Years' War (1758–1762), Kant's financial circumstances improved, as he obtained a number of well-paid tutoring assignments from Russian military officers and civil administrators stationed in the city.

In December 1758, after the death of Johann David Kypke, Kant petitioned Empress Elizabeth for appointment to the vacant chair of logic and metaphysics at the University of Königsberg, but the position was awarded to another candidate.

Did You Know?

• Kant was baptized as Emanuel, changing the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew.
• Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant, was a German harness-maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania).
• In 1756, Kant published three papers on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, one of the first systematic attempts to explain earthquakes in natural rather than supernatural terms.
• Kant correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized had formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud.

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