Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, in 1724 and never travelled more than 150 km from his birthplace. He spent his entire career at the University of Königsberg, where his afternoon walk through the linden trees of the Philosopher's Path was so punctual that townspeople reportedly set their watches by him. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) attempted to settle, once and for all, what human reason can and cannot legitimately claim to know; the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) grounded morality not in consequences but in the categorical imperative — to act only on principles you could will to be universal law; the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) extended the analysis to aesthetic and teleological judgement. He died in 1804; his last words, accepting a glass of watered wine, were 'Es ist gut.' Almost every continental philosophy of the next two centuries — Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre — argued with him.
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Philosopher · Author of the Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant
1,724 CE – 1,804 CE
The Königsberg philosopher whose three Critiques redrew the boundary between what we can know and what we must do — and reshaped every philosophy that came after.
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