Kant, Immanuel

Immanuel Kant was born on the 22nd of April, 1724, in Koenigsberg,Prussia (now Kaliningrad) and he died in the same city on the 12th of February, 1804. He was the fourth of nine children of his parents, Anna Regina, neé Reuter, and Johann Georg Kant, who both belonged to a Pietist branch of the Lutheran Church. When Immanuel Kant was eight, he entered the Piestist school, Friedrichskollegium, and remained there until 1740. As his parents were rather poor, he was dependent on financial support from Franz Albert Schultz (1692–1763), who had realized Kant's immense talent, and who was headmaster of Kant's school, professor of theology, and pupil of the famous German thinker of the Enlightenment, Christian Wolff (1697–1754).

Kant's mother died in 1737 while he was still at school. From 1740 to 1746, the year his father died, Kant attended the University of Koenigsberg, studying philosophy, mathematics, natural sciences, and theology. After university, Kant earned his income as a private tutor for three families in the area of Koenigsberg. In 1755, he completed both his doctoral degree (Meditationum quarundam de igne succinta delineatio), as well as his habilitation (postdoctoral qualification) thesis (Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio).

In autumn 1755, he started to lecture at the University of Koenigsberg, and he had to finance himself from the fees he received from his students. The first time Kant had a salaried post was in 1766 as a librarian. Later, he was offered various professorships (e.g., Erlangen,Jena), which he turned down. He had to wait until 1770, when he was already forty-six, to become Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Koenigsberg. Eleven years later, Kant's groundbreaking work, Kritik der reinen Vernunft(Critique of Pure Reason, 1781) was released. Schopenhauer named it the most important book ever written in Europe; however, initial response was not so favorable. As a consequence, he wrote the Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik which was published in 1783, the same year Kant bought himself a house. In 1785 Kant published the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten; in 1787 the second edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft; in1788, the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft; and in1790, the Kritik der Urteilskraft. In 1793, Kant published Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, and it was this work that brought him into conflict with state authorities who wished to censor the work. A year later, he even wrote a second treatise on the philosophy of religion, Das Ende aller Dinge. As a consequence, he received an official letter accusing him of degrading Christianity and violating his duties as a teacher of youth. Even though he rejected the accusations, he agreed to refrain from writing further works about the philosophy of religion. Zum ewigen Frieden (1795), was Kant's first book after his conflict with the authorities, and Die Metaphysik der Sitten was released in 1797. In Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), Kant published further material on the philosophy of religion since Friedrich Wilhem II, who was mainly responsible for the intolerant political atmosphere, had died. In October 1803, Kant became seriously ill. He died on the 12th of February, 1804.

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