ABSTRACT
Immanuel Kant is often regarded as the greatest of all German philosophers, perhaps even the greatest philosopher of modern times. With Kant and German idealism, philosophy left the superficialities of the Enlightenment and returned to the serious matters of rational investigation. The metaphysical tradition of the west was continued, if in a slightly different form in that the Idealists accepted something from contemporary criticism, where they felt it was justified, and even contributed to that criticism themselves, especially Kant. However, compared with sensualism, scepticism and the trite utilitarianism of the Empiricists, German idealism set itself the conservative aim of reviving and reinvestigating the metaphysics, ethics and religious theory of the ancients. Kant's most famous work, the Critique of Pure Reason, was first published in 1781. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy started where Kant had left off, at the thing-in-itself, the object, the noumenon, the material of the a priori form.
