Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) Essay -- Essays Papers

Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)Author of Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). The Enlightenment was a propensity for humankind affairs to be guided by rationality than by creed, superstition, or revelation a belief in the power of human reason to change society and liberate the individual from the restraints of custom or arbitrary authority all backed up by a world view increasingly validated by science sort of than by religion or tradition. (Outram 1995)In the eighteenth century, people started sceptical the authority and knowledge of the church. New ideas placing human reason over faith and blind obedience began arising. This period in history is known as the Enlightenment. It is a movement, still in progress, for individual people to reach and hopefully grasp their highest potential. It began with the writings of philosophers such as Voltaire (1694-1778) and Charles-Louis Montesquieu (1689-1755). The second wave include Denis Diderot (1713-78), dAlembert (17 14-80), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), and the final stretch came from thinkers such as Lessing and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). All three eras punctuate happy reason over faith and put more combine on scientific discoveries and revelations. However, the people in the third part, especially Immanuel Kant, having the gather of hindsight, are able to encompass the movement from faith to reason in their writings. The basic details of Kants biographic life take very unretentive space. He was born in 1724 in Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia and peerless of Frederick the Greats garrison towns. Kant knew what it was like to screw as a peasant, since he came from a peasant family. His father was a harness maker. From an early age, Kant showed much intellectual potential and his local fame gained him admittance into a school called the Collegium Fredericianum, an institution control by Pietists. Pietism was an eighteenth century fundamentalist movement inside Germa n Protestantism, also followed by his parents, that minimized the authority of the church and upset individual honourable conduct (Sullivan 1994). Then, he attended the University of Konigsberg, also staffed in the main by Pietists. The influence of this religious background is reflected in Kants beliefs in the worldly concern of God, in the dignity of each person, and in a universal moral code. Kant spen... ...e believes that it is still going on. The time of Enlightenment is not over still we still presently are in it today. He says If it is asked now whether we live at present in an Enlightened age, the answer is No, but we do live in an age of Enlightenment (Velkley 1989). Immanuel Kant bear ons University of Arkansas Link University of Arkansas Link Kant Homepage Link Kant Homepage Works Cited - Acton, H.B., Kants Moral Philosophy, make by Macmillan and Co., right of first publication 1970. - Buchdahl, Gerd, Kan t and the Dynamics of Reason, promulgated by Blackwell Publishers, Copyright 1992. - Deleuze, Gilles, Kants Critical Philosophy, published by The University of Minnesota Press, Copyright 1983. - Sullivan, Roger J., An Introduction to Kants Ethics, published by Cambridge University Press, Copyright 1994. - Velkley, Richard L., Freedom and the End of Reason, published by The University of Chicago, Copyright 1989. - Wood, Allen W., Kants Rational Theology, published by Cornell University Press, Copyright 1978.