Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant
Born	(1724-04-22)22 April 1724 Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia)
Died	12 February 1804(1804-02-12) (aged 79) Königsberg, Prussia
Residence	Königsberg, Prussia
Nationality	Prussian
Education	Collegium Fridericianum
Alma mater	University of Königsberg (MA, 1755; PhD, 1755; PhD, 1770)
Era	18th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Kantianism Enlightenment philosophy German idealism
Institutions	University of Königsberg
Main interests	Epistemology Metaphysics Ethics Cosmogony
Notable ideas	Transcendental idealism Critical philosophy Synthetic a priori Noumenon Sapere aude Categorical imperative Hypothetical imperative "Kingdom of Ends" The understanding–reason distinction The abstract–concrete distinction The primacy of the practical Nebular hypothesis
Influences Wolff Baumgarten Plato Aristotle Empiricus Hume Smith Descartes Spinoza Leibniz Knutzen Locke Rousseau Newton Johannes Nikolaus Tetens Swedenborg Euclid Epicurus
Influenced Virtually all subsequent Western philosophy, notably: Fichte Schelling Jacobi Beck Kraus Maimon Reinhold F. Schlegel A. W. Schlegel Hegel Schopenhauer Nietzsche Peirce Husserl Heidegger Cassirer Habermas Rawls Chomsky Piaget Kierkegaard T. W. Adorno Hilbert Foucault Weber Strawson Strauss McDowell Simmel Azurmendi Guyer Seung Pogge Zongsan Nozick Roy Bhaskar
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Immanuel Kant (/kænt/;German: [ɪˈmaːnu̯eːl kant]; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher who is considered a central figure in modern philosophy. Kant argued that the human mind creates the structure of human experience, that reason is the source of morality, that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment, that space and time are forms of our sensibility, and that the world as it is "in-itself" is independent of our concepts of it. Kant took himself to have effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy, akin to Copernicus' reversal of the age-old belief that the sun revolved around the earth. His beliefs continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, and aesthetics.

Kant in his critical phase sought to 'reverse' the orientation of pre-critical philosophy by showing how the traditional problems of metaphysics can be overcome by supposing that the agreement between reality and the concepts we use to conceive it arises not because our mental concepts have come to passively mirror reality, but because reality must conform to the human mind's active concepts to be conceivable and at all possible for us to experience. Kant thus regarded the basic categories of the human mind as the transcendental "condition of possibility" for any experience.