Immanuel Kant IPA: [I:manuəl kant] (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and of the late Enlightenment.

Biography

Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, as the fourth of eleven children (five of them reached adulthood). He was baptized as 'Emanuel' but later changed his name to 'Immanuel'[1] after he learned Hebrew. He spent his entire life in and around his hometown, the capital of Prussia at that time, never traveling more than a hundred miles from Königsberg.[2] His father Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746) was a German craftsman from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). His mother Anna Regina Porter (1697–1737), born in Nuremberg, was the daughter of a Scottish saddle and harness maker. In his youth, Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. He was raised in a Pietist household that stressed intense religious devotion, personal humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. Consequently, Kant received a stern education — strict, punitive, and disciplinary — that favored Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science.[3]

[edit] The Young Scholar