ABSTRACT
The philosophy of Immanuel Kant is an obvious starting point on European philosophy and its relation to religion. In many ways, Kant’s critical turn towards the transcendental subject—exploring how the nature of human thinking imposes conditions upon all understanding of reality—is the precursor to all that follows. An Enlightenment thinker himself, Kant was brought up as a Pietist and remained fundamentally concerned with giving a rational articulation to an essentially Protestant faith. Kant’s critical project was first announced in his Critique of Pure Reason, which posed a simple problem: how is metaphysics possible? In his thought, metaphysics is universal and necessary, but no longer objective or imagined. Religion, for Kant, is defined in purely subjective terms as a quality of the human will: religion is the recognition of all moral duties as divine commands. He remained preoccupied by religion throughout his life.
