Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central thinkers of the Enlightenment. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and highly discussed figures in modern Western philosophy. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" that structure all experience and that the objects of experience are mere "appearances". He wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), his best-known work, in an attempt to counter the philosophical doctrine of skepticism. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican Revolution in his proposal to think of the objects of experience as conforming to people's spatial and temporal forms of intuition and the categories of their understanding so that they have a priori cognition of those objects. Kant believed that reason is the source of morality and that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment. His religious views were deeply connected to his moral theory. He hoped that perpetual peace could be secured through an international federation of republican states.