His father Johann Georg Kant (1682-1746) was a German craftsman from Memel. Kant’s German mother, who herself had come from a family of saddle makers, was a wholly uneducated though highly intelligent woman. As such, she would prove to be young Immanuel’s greatest source of inspiration.
Kant received a stern education — strict, punitive, and disciplinary — that favoredLatin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. In his tenth year he was entered at the Collegium Fredericianum with the definite view of studying theology.
At the age of eighteen, Kant was admitted into the University of Königsberg where he took up an education in theology. Although his education was financed for the most part by the local Pietist community, Kant was able to earn extra money while working as a tutor for some of his less acute classmates.
After graduating, he was given the position of junior lecturer at the University. During his early years at the University, Kant published works on a wide array of topics, including treatises on geography, astronomy, meteorology, and anthropology.
In 1770 he obtained the chair of logic and metaphysics at Konigsberg, and delivered as his inaugural address the dissertation De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma et principiis.
Eleven years later appeared the Kritik of Pure Reason, the work towards which he had been steadily advancing, and of which all his later writings are developments. Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique was largely ignored upon its initial publication.
The 1790 Critique of Judgment (the third Critique)applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology. He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics.
According to Kant, philosophy is the result of human reasoning. He reasoned about metaphysics, intelligible objects, and ethics. Kant's health, long poor, turned for the worse and he died in 1804.
Immanuel Kant: German philosopher
