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3 Chapter 1 Kant’s Philosophical Biography This chapter presents a brief account of Kant’s life and a general overview of the development of his thought throughout the wide range of his writings and interests . The presentation follows Kant’s activity in a chronological and thematic order and discusses only the core ideas for each work. The purpose of this chapter is to show the complexity of Kant’s itinerary toward the Critique of Judgment. 1. The Origins of Kant’s Philosophy, 1746–1765 Immanuel Kant was born in the East Prussian town of Königsberg on April 22, 1724. His father, the son of Scottish emigrants, was a saddler of humble condition whose strict morality remained his son’s most relevant memory. His mother, a devout Christian, was for her children a model of religious and moral integrity. Both of Kant’s parents belonged to the pietistic confession of the Lutheran church. Kant spent his whole life in Königsberg, where he attended the Collegium Fridericianum (1732–40), and then the Albertus-Universität (1740–46). From 1747 to 1754, Kant was employed as a tutor in aristocratic families. In 1755 he started his academic career at the University of Königsberg. In 1770 he was appointed professor of Logic and Metaphysics; in the two summer semesters of 1786 and 1788, he was appointed rector. He remained active in his functions until 1801. He died on February 12, 1804. Kant’s first biographers and friends, Ludwig Ernst Borowski, Bernhard Jachmann, and Ehregott Andreas Christoph Wasianski, gave accurate descriptions of Kant’s character, habits, private and academic life, and humanity. They portray, albeit in quite different ways, a gentle and kind man of strict morality, fascinating in conversation and curious in his social life.1 At the beginning of the century, the University of Königsberg was under the guidance of Franz Albert Schultz, who established its pietistic orientation and in 1734 appointed Martin Knutzen as extraordinary professor for Logic and Metaphysics . Knutzen, who followed Wolff’s philosophy in an unorthodox way, was an important teacher for Kant. His interests in natural science led him to abandon 1. See Immanuel Kant. Sein Leben in Darstellungen von Zeitgenossen. Die Biographien von L. E. Borowski, R. B. Jachmann und A. Chr. Wasianski, ed. by F. Gross, Berlin, 1912; see the material collected in: Immanuel Kant im Rede und Gespräch, ed. by R. Malter, Hamburg, Meiner, 1990; K. Vorländer, Immanuel Kant. Der Mann und das Werk, 2 vols., Leipzig, Meiner, 1924; one of the first English biographies is J. H. W. Stuckenberg , The Life of Immanuel Kant, London, Macmillan, 1882. One of the latest English biographies is M. Kuehn, Kant: A Biography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. 4 Chapter 1 some of Leibniz’s essential doctrines such as the preestablished harmony.2 After 1740, however, with Friedrich II king, the cultural situation in Prussia changed radically. Friedrich II, who strongly opposed Pietism, appointed the French philosopher Maupertuis as president of the Berlin Academy. Thenceforth, this move gave a decisive antischolastic orientation to German philosophy. In 1740, Christian August Crusius started the publication of his works. Crusius represented, against Wolff and the Leibnizian tradition, the new empiricist development of German metaphysics. Kant’s early philosophical interests were determined by this cultural climate.3 Kant’s early writings were influenced by the scientific interests of his teacher, Knutzen, and show how his attempts to think of metaphysics in relation to natural science (1747–58) would eventually lead him to reflect upon the problem of metaphysics as science (1760–66). Kant reads and combines in interesting ways Leibniz and Newton, Knutzen and Crusius; against this background, he then turns to Rousseau and Hume. The scientific and cosmological orientation of Kant’s thought is accompanied by a sensibility to moral questions that broaden into the fields of history, anthropology, and aesthetics (from the 1755 Universal History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens up to the important 1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime ). Kant’s first publication in 1747, “Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces,”4 discloses his early interests in the scientific culture of the time. In the framework of Leibniz’s dynamism, Kant combines Knutzen’s theory of the infuxus physicus with Newton’s law of attraction; he pleads for a new determination of the notion of force and presents his first reflections on the problem of space. In 1754, Kant published two articles on scientific...

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