Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant, like Plato and Aristotle, counts as one of the most influential philosophers of all time. He developed a new theory of time and space that combined insights from rationalism and empiricism. In his practical philosophy he developed a completely new approach, which makes Kant one of the most distinguished scholars of the European Enlightenment.

Kant was born in Königsberg (formerly East Prussia, since 1945 renamed Kaliningrad, Russia) on April 22, 1724, as the son of a saddler. He was brought up in the spirit of Pietism, a Lutheran movement that focused on love, which is realized through duty and good deeds. He never left Königsberg. It was there where he went to school and attended university, where he received permission to teach as a university lecturer (Privatdozent) in 1755, and again where he was appointed full professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770 after declining an offer from Jena in 1769. He held this position for the rest of his life and died on February 12, 1804.

The tone of the German intellectual landscape in which Kant started his work was largely set by the so-called “school philosophy” of Leibniz and Wolff, a thoroughgoing form of rationalism. Wolff, continuing Leibniz's work, believed that every truth of reason could be deduced from the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. When Kant encountered Hume's empiricist philosophy, he felt awakened from his dogmatic slumbers. In 1770 he consolidated many of the intellectual gains he had made during the 1750s and 1760s in his Latin inaugural dissertation (Habilitationsschrift). He introduced an important new theory about the epis-temology and metaphysics of time (and space). His fundamental new philosophical insight, which he later elaborated in his famous work Critique of Pure Reason, goes as follows:

The same holds for space, which he maintains is also neither objective nor real. Kant combines [Page 739]Hume's empiricist point of view with the rationalistic assumption of an ordered universe. Hume believes that with sense-knowledge, the given consists of impressions and sensations, and, for this reason, we can only discover post hoc a succession in time without causal relation. Rationalists assume that there is a fundamental causal connection between events (a post hoc principle of sufficient reason). Kant explains that time and space, as our subjective forms of intuition, are the reason why we have the experience of causal connections without holding that these causal connections are real in an absolute sense. But they are real to us, because all human beings have the same experience, which results from the notion that all human beings have the same subjective forms of intuition; that is, of time and space. Kant's position on time and space is of great philosophical interest. For example, Einstein's theory of relativity shows that it is not possible for us to have absolute time or space, so it seems to be true that our experiences are just of appearances and do not tell the whole story.

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