Summary of Immanuel Kant's Life

Summary of Immanuel Kant's Life

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) spent all of his life in Königsberg, a

small German town on the Baltic Sea in East Prussia. (After World War II,

Germany's border was pushed west, so Königsberg is now called

Kaliningrad and is part of Russia.) At the age of fifty-five, Kant appeared to

be a washout. He had taught at Königsberg University for over twenty

years, yet had not published any works of significance.

During the last twenty-five years of his life, however, Kant left a

mark on the history of philosophy that is rivaled only by such towering

giants as Plato and Aristotle. Kant's three major works are often

considered to be the starting points for different branches of modern

philosophy: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) for the philosophy of

mind; the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) for moral philosophy; and

the Critique of Judgment (1790) for aesthetics, the philosophy of art.

The Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals was published in

1785, just before the Critique of Practical Reason. It is essentially a short

introduction to the argument presented in the second Critique. In order to

understand what Kant is up to in this book, it is useful to know something

about Kant's other works and about the intellectual climate of his time.

Kant lived and wrote during a period in European intellectual history

called the "Enlightenment." Stretching from the mid-seventeenth century to

the early nineteenth, this period produced the ideas about human rights and

democracy that inspired the French and American revolutions. (Some other

major figures of the Enlightenment were Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and

Leibniz.)

The characteris...

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...mental concepts of reason.

Some later scholars and philosophers have criticized Enlightenment

philosophers like Kant for placing too much confidence in reason. Some

have argued that rational analysis isn't the best way to deal with moral

questions. Further, some have argued that Enlightenment thinkers were

pompous to think that they could discover the timeless truths of reason; in

fact, their ideas were determined by their culture just as all other people's

are. Some experts have gone as far as to associate the Enlightenment with

the crimes of imperialism, noting a similarity between the idea of reason

dispelling myth and the idea that Western people have a right and a duty to

supplant less "advanced" civilizations. As we work through the Grounding

for the Metaphysics of Morals, we will return to such criticisms as they

apply to Kant.