Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
advocated by Anthony Grayling

Listen to Anthony Grayling say why you should vote for Immanuel Kant

'Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.'

Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg in Prussia and never left the town during his life. He became Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at its university and one pupil commented that "nothing worth knowing was indifferent to him".

Kant started a revolution in philosophy by examining how the mind constructed our knowledge of the objective world and the limits thereof. He set out his thinking in three critiques - The Critique of Pure Reason (1781); The Critique of Practical Reason (1788); and The Critique of Judgment (1790).

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argued that objects in the world must conform to our innate understanding of them. Reason makes experience possible by imposing upon raw sense data certain categories of understanding.

Kant identified twelve basic categories. These categories were innate, independent of experience and they allowed us to give order and reason to the universe. In the second critique Kant argued for the existence of absolute moral law, placing moral duty above the pursuit of happiness.

Moral law could not be affected by expediency, for example Kant reasoned that it could never be right to tell a lie. He called our obligation to obey this moral law the "categorical imperative".

In his third critique Kant turned his attention to aesthetics, arguing that there was an objective basis for aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic judgment was not the same as taste, it was not contingent. The truly beautiful was beautiful in an objective sense and this could be recognised by everyone.

Kant also produced several essays in support of religious liberalism and the Enlightenment.

Works by Immanuel Kant on Project Gutenberg: The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason and other major works

Read about Immanuel Kant on Wikipedia including The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason and other major works.

Read about Immanuel Kant on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Read about Immanuel Kant on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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Listen to Anthony Grayling say why you should vote for Immanuel Kant

Anthony Grayling

Anthony Grayling is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London and a Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He is Honorary Secretary of the Aristotelian Society, the principal learned society of academic philosophers in the United Kingdom. His books include Wittgenstein (1988); Russell (1995); The Mystery of Things (2004) and The Heart of Things (2005). He has also edited; Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject (1995); Philosophy 2: Further Through the Subject (1998) and he writes for the Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times, The Literary Review and Prospect Magazine.