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Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant, born in Konigsberg, on April 22, 1724, attempted to rebuild philosophy from the ground up. Kant transcended both philosophies of his time, Rationalism and Empiricism. We believe his work did in fact change philosophy permanently. Kant was born near the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, which is now known as Kalingrad. This was an important regional port, alive with English, Dutch, Polish, and Russian traders. It was the capital of East Prussia, which had become a “Kingdom” in 1701 when Frederick I crowned himself in Konisberg. Kant was the fourth born of many children, of whom five lived to adulthood. His parents were pietist Lutherans of modest means, his father a master harness maker. After a few years of grammar school, a family friend, the Lutheran pietist preacher Franz Albert Schultz, who had studied with the foremost philosopher in Germany, Christian Wolff, recognized Kant’s talent. Shultz recommended to Kant’s mother that the boy, then eight, should attend the Lutheran Collegium Fridericianum. It was primarily a Latin school, strict and pedantic, where Kant studied the classics, largely by rote; the enforced outward piety experienced in his school was as impetuous to his lifelong endeavor to separate the social practices of religion from its intellectual and moral substance. Kant wrote eight major books between 1781 and 1797, as well as numerous essays and articles making him the most famous and influential deontologist of all time (Thomson 4). Kant’s most famous and most influential book was his first, “The Critique of Reason,” which was published in 1781. This book was published after a period of intense reflection for over ten years. This first book was an expression of a long struggle to escape from the presupposition of the age (Thomson 4). The brilliance of Kant’s philosophy in his first book is how it identifies and transcends the two dominant traditions in philosophy of his time, Rationalism and Empiricism, represented primarily by Leibniz and Hume. It is important to note that Rationalism and Empiricism were generalizations applied to major philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, but misleading: philosophers of the time did not regard themselves in these terms, but it has become an easy way to understand the philosophies (Thomson 5). Kant believed modern philosophy was in a deadlock due to these two areas of thought. He believed that Rationalism and Empiricism shared certain fundamental assumptions, which needed to be rejected to break the deadlock in thought (Thomson 6).
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