ABSTRACT
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), one of the most influential philosophers in the modern world, was born in Königsberg (then part of Prussia, now called Kaliningrad and part of the Russian Federation) and lived and taught there for his entire life. He is most well known as the author of three “Critiques”— the Critique of Pure Reason (of 1781 and 1787), the Critique of Practical Reason (of 1788), which followed another work on moral philosophy, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), and the Critique of Judgment (1791)— throughout which he developed his so-called “transcendental idealism”. In his earlier “pre-critical” philosophy, Kant put forward a type of nat-
ural philosophy which combined elements of Leibniz’s metaphysics (transmitted mainly through the influence of Christian Wolff, the most influential of Leibniz’s German followers) with elements of a natural philosophy associated with Newton (again, transmitted through the influence of earlier German philosophers). During this time Kant put forward a cosmological hypothesis explaining the structure of the universe from physical principles (later called the Kant-Laplace hypothesis). In the mid-1760s a series of reflections on the structure of space and time in which he pointed to problems in Leibniz’s critique of the Newtonian account led to the fundamental thesis of Kant’s later transcendental idealism, the thesis of the “transcendental ideality” of space and time. According to this thesis, what we experience as the basic features of space (its tri-dimensionality) and of time (its “one-way” directionality from past to future) are not features of what space and time are like “in themselves”, but rather result from the way that the mind “represents” objects and events in its experience. The thesis of transcendental idealism was developed in the Critique of
Pure Reason into a general theory of the way in which coherent thought about and experience of the world depends upon the mind’s own cognitive “architectonic”. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant linked such aspects of the mind’s theoretical functioning to what he took to be the most important feature of human
existence, the human capacity for freedom as it is manifested in moral action. In later work, including the “third Critique”, the Critique of Judgment which was concerned with the role of judgment in aesthetics and (effectively) biology, Kant tried to unify the pictures of theoretical and practical reason-and, by implication, the account of humans as knowers of the world, and free agents in the world-found in the first two Critiques. This attempt to unify these two divergent pictures of ourselves was, in turn, central to the work of the subsequent German “idealists” that followed Kant.
