biography
pronunciation:
[kant]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1724–1804)
|
| biography:
| Philosopher, born in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He spent his entire life there, studying at the university, and becoming professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. His early publications were in the natural sciences, particularly astronomy and geophysics, and he published prolifically on a great range of subjects throughout his life. His main work, now a philosophical classic, is the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, Critique of Pure Reason), in which he provided a response to the empiricism of Hume. His views on ethics are set out in the Grundlagen zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals) and the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788, Critique of Practical Reason), in which he elaborates on the Categorical Imperative as the supreme principle of morality. In his third and last Critique, the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790, Critique of Judgment), he argued that aesthetic judgments, although universal, do not depend on any property (such as beauty or sublimity) of the object. He also wrote on politics, and his Perpetual Peace (1795) advocates a world system of free states. He exerted tremendous influence on subsequent philosophy, especially the idealism of Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling. |
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