Critique of Practical Reason

Born on April 22, 1724, Immanuel Kant was the son of a harness-maker, Johann Georg Kant, and his wife, Anna Regina Reuter. The family lived in Königsberg, a major city and Baltic Sea port in what was then the kingdom of Prussia in northeastern Germany (today the city is part of Russia, hence its Russified present-day name of Kaliningrad). Kant’s parents were both Lutheran Christians and subscribed to Pietism, a Lutheran movement that emphasized personal transformation through strict adherence to spiritual practices and biblical rules of living. Although Kant would be a Christian throughout his life, his dislike of “religious enthusiasm” suggests that he rejected Pietism at some point.

Kant studied at the University of Königsberg, first specializing in classics and then switching to philosophy. He aspired to become a professor there, but after his parents’ deaths by 1746, he lost his means of financial support and had to find work away from the university as a private tutor. By 1754, he was able to return to the university after getting a job as a Privatdozent, a lecturer paid directly by the students. A year later, he was able to complete his doctorate in philosophy with the thesis New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition. By 1770, he finished a second dissertation, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World, often called the Inaugural Dissertation by scholars today. Finally, by this point, he had achieved his ambition of becoming a Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the university. Kant became a popular teacher at the University of Königsberg. He was also well known for living such an exact daily schedule that his neighbors could tell the time by when he took his daily walks.

Kant was a prolific writer, writing not only about philosophy and ethics, but also about physics, geology, astronomy, meteorology, religion, anthropology, and cultural aesthetics. However, he is most known for his philosophical works, which, besides his three Critiques, include Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Kant became something of a celebrity intellectual by the 1780s, with thousands attending his funeral after his death in 1804. Today, he is agreed to be a major figure in the history of philosophy as the founder of the modern study of ethics. He is also often seen as a transitional figure between early modern or Enlightenment philosophy and modern philosophy, mainly because of how he resolved the debate between empiricism and rationalism that had dominated much of Western philosophical thought since Descartes in the 17th century.