Immanuel Kant (22 April, 1724 – 12 February, 1804), was a German philosopher from Königsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment.

Kant and his philosophy

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Kant defined the Enlightenment, in the essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", as an age shaped by the motto, "Dare to know" (latin: Sapere aude). This involved thinking Autonomy, free of the dictates of external authority. Kant's work served as a bridge between the Rationalist and Empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers.

The two interconnected foundations of what Kant called his "critical philosophy" of the "Copernican revolution" which he claimed to have wrought in philosophy were his epistemology (or theory of knowledge) of Transcendental Idealism and his moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason. These placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. With regard to knowledge, Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science could never be accounted for merely by the fortuitous accumulation of sense perceptions. It was instead the product of the rule-based activity of "synthesis". This consisted of conceptual unification and integration carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time, which are not concepts, but forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it are dependent upon the mind. There is wide disagreement among Kant scholars on the correct interpretation of this train of thought. The common '2-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are never able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-itself". Kant however also speaks of the thing in itself or transcendental object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this thought, interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alone. Much of current Kant-research revolves around this dispute. With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity - understood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as others, as an end in itself rather than (merely) as means.

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