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Portrait of Immanuel Kant

Philosophy

Immanuel Kant

1724–1804 · Prussian (German)

Enlightenment; transcendental idealism

Immanuel Kant was a Königsberg professor whose three Critiques reshaped modern philosophy. He sought to reconcile rationalism and empiricism by arguing that the mind actively structures experience, and he grounded morality in reason through the categorical imperative.

How to spot them

  • ▸Königsberg (now Kaliningrad); the three Critiques
  • ▸Categorical imperative, synthetic a priori, noumena and phenomena, "Copernican revolution" in philosophy
  • ▸"Sapere aude" ("Dare to know") as the motto of Enlightenment
  • ▸Hume woke him from his "dogmatic slumber"

Key works

Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) (1781)

Asks how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible; space, time and the categories structure experience, but things-in-themselves are unknowable (2nd ed. 1787)

Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784)

Defines Enlightenment as humanity's emergence from self-incurred immaturity, with the motto "Sapere aude!"

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

Sets out the good will, duty and the categorical imperative

Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

The moral law, freedom of the will, and God and immortality as postulates of practical reason

Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft) (1790)

Aesthetic judgments of the beautiful and the sublime, and teleology in nature

Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795)

Proposes republican constitutions and a federation of free states to end war — an inspiration for the League of Nations and UN

Key ideas

  • Categorical imperative: act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law; also, treat humanity always as an end and never merely as a means
  • Hypothetical vs categorical imperatives: "if you want X, do Y" versus unconditional moral commands binding on all rational beings
  • Synthetic a priori judgments (e.g. in mathematics and "every event has a cause") are informative yet known independently of experience
  • Copernican revolution: instead of our knowledge conforming to objects, objects as experienced conform to the structures of our mind
  • Transcendental idealism: we know phenomena (things as they appear), not noumena (things-in-themselves)
  • Only a good will is good without qualification; moral worth lies in acting from duty, not from inclination or for consequences

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born, lived and died in Königsberg, East Prussia, and never travelled far from it
  • •Famed for the clockwork punctuality of his daily walk
  • •Credited David Hume with interrupting his "dogmatic slumber" (Prolegomena, 1783)
  • •The Critique of Practical Reason's conclusion expresses awe at "the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me"
  • •Wrote "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made" (1784), later a book title for Isaiah Berlin
  • •Proposed a nebular hypothesis of the solar system's origin in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), later developed by Laplace
  • •Kaliningrad's university is now the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University

Drill it — 10 cards

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Sources