Kant, Immanuel

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

Immanuel (1724-1804), a German philosopher. He was born in Konigsburg, Prussia, on the Baltic. He was educated there, and held later a professorship in the university of his native city. He was a remarkable student. As Socrates could hardly be induced to go beyond the walls of Athens, so Kant clung with oyster-like tenacity to the city of his birth, never leaving it through the thirty years of his professorship. He remained a bachelor all his life. He is considered one of the world's greatest thinkers. The range of his studies may be learned from the fact that, before settling down to metaphysics or mental philosophy, he lectured on logic, mathematics, physics, and physical geography. His system of philosophy is too difficult a subject to be understood readily. It is perhaps sufficient to say that he begins by dividing all knowledge into two classes: first, that which is born in us, or which would come by pure thinking to a blind, deaf person--one shut off from the world. Ideas of space and time are of this sort. Other knowledge, as the fact that fire will injure the finger, is derived from experience. Knowledge independent of experience is a priori. Knowledge born of experience is a posteriori. Kant's greatest work is The Critique of Pure Reason. Pure reason he defined to be the faculty of understanding by a priori principles. Since Kant's death there have been explanations, defenses, and attacks of his system quite numerous enough to fill a large library. See Herbart