Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was an idealist and Enlightenment philosopher from Königsberg in Prussia (now Kaliningrad in Russia).

Kant's philosophical career reflects the breadth of his teaching and his interests. When, after 1770, he finally came to write the works for which he is most famous, namely the three Critiques, he addressed what he saw as the fundamental questions that cover human concerns: 'what can I know?', 'what ought I do?' and 'what may I hope for?'. His answers to these questions is marked by the changes he bequeathed to epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. Writing in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant himself described these changes as a 'Copernican Revolution'. Some of his many other works focus upon the consequences of these foundational revolutions for moral behaviour, law, physical science and religious belief.

Kant's philosophy is set against that of David Hume's empiricism and Gottfried Leibniz's rationalism. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant tries to overcome both of these positions and forge a philosophy suitable for the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that took inspiration from the success of science in the preceding two centuries, and from the decline in the power of the Church. This optimistic age of philosophy held to individual autonomy and freedom of choice, believing that political freedom could follow intellectual freedom. Sapere aude! ('dare to know') was the motto that Kant gave in What is Enlightenment?.