Immanuel Kant

1724-1804 · German · Epistemology, Ethics, Metaphysics, Political Philosophy, Aesthetics

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Immanuel Kant spent his entire life in the Prussian town of Königsberg, never traveling more than a few miles from it, and kept a routine so exact that neighbors were said to set their clocks by his afternoon walk. He labored fifteen years as an unsalaried lecturer, then fell into a "silent decade" of near-total publishing silence — until 1781, when the Critique of Pure Reason broke open one of the most disruptive ideas in the history of thought: that we never experience reality as it is in itself. The mind actively shapes the raw data of the senses, imposing space, time, and causality on…

Topics Immanuel Kant addresses

• transcendental idealism
• the Copernican turn
• phenomena and noumena
• things-in-themselves
• the synthetic a priori
• the categories of the understanding
• the transcendental deduction
• the antinomies of pure reason
• the categorical imperative
• universalizability
• the humanity formulation
• the kingdom of ends
• autonomy of the will
• acting from duty
• moral worth
• the good will
• the highest good
• the postulates of practical reason
• radical evil
• the murderer at the door
• the doctrine of right
• the social contract
• republican government
• the prohibition on revolution

Converse with Immanuel Kant on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Immanuel Kant's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.