Immanuel Kant
A timeline view of the life of Immanuel Kant.
Isaac Newton
Immanuel Kant
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Christian Wolff
In the school of Wolff at the period in Germany, works of art were treated with regard to the feelings they were supposed to produce, as, for instance, the feeling of pleasure, admiration, fear, pity, and so on.
David Hume
Kant was coming under the additional influences of the empiricist skepticism of Hume In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological theory that holds that knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Kant became influenced by Rousseau's ethical and political thought.
1760s - Importance of Logic and Metaphysics
Around the 1760s, Kant was increasingly admiring of Leibniz's great rival Newton. In this period he produced a series of works attacking Leibnizian thought. In particular, he now argued that the traditional tools of philosophy - logic and metaphysics - had to be understood to be severely limited with respect to obtaining knowledge of reality.
Inaugural Dissertation of 1770
In this Dissertation, Kant began to move towards the ideas that would make him famous and change the face of philosophy. He argued for three key new ideas: 1) Sensible and conceptual presentations of the world (for example, my seeing three horses, and my concept of three) must be understood to be **two quite distinct sources of possible knowledge**. 2) It follows that knowledge of sensible reality is only possible if the necessary concepts (such as substance) **are already available to the intellect**. This fact, Kant argued, also limits the legitimate range of application of these concepts. 3) Kant claimed that sensible presentations were of **only appearances**', and **not things as they are in themselves**. This was because space and time, which describe the basic structure of all sensible appearances, are not existent in things in themselves, but are **only a product of our organs of sense**. Perceiving things in space and time is a function of the mind of the perceiver.
Critique of Pure Reason
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Hegel said, philosophy began with Kant, completed by him.
French Revolution
Friedrich Schiller
Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Industrial Revolution
Critique of Judgment