He hoped to lay out what we described as a ‘cosmic’ idea of philosophy – one that followed in Newton’s footsteps when we discovered the laws of motion and gravity – Kant wanted to layout the laws that governed human thought, human experience, human action. Immanuel Kant – born in 1724 – wanted to make us a truly scientific species – he wanted to bring together reason – how we think – and experience – what we see, hear, touch through our senses – on a sure foundation – one that scientific knowledge could be built on. This is also the story of a man, who, like Kant, is attempting to find their way up a mountain, searching for something pure at the top. So we’ll look at both his ideas about rationality, knowledge, and his philosophy of morality, and in doing so, we’ll try and find a peak, a viewpoint, from which we can reliably view the world, a solid foundation to stand on, from which we can find some tools, some guidelines for thinking and acting, a place we might be able to find pure reason. He said that the Enlightenment – that 18 th century period of radical change in Europe – was ‘man’s emergence from immaturity’ – and reading him, when you really understand what he’s saying, really does have an effect on the inner workings of your mind you can feel the way you think changing.

That if we used it properly, we could begin to strip away misconceptions, false opinion, all this fuzz, all of this confusion, all of this complexity, and find within us pure reason. That in here, we had a powerful tool that no-one had yet properly understood. He saw that people had been pushed around – by religious zealots, powerful leaders, and arrogant metaphysicians– and he wanted to prove and show how we could think for ourselves. The course of history, us, our ways of thinking and acting. Each of us swim in the water of his philosophy – politically, morally, culturally. Immanuel Kant – one of the most influential, consequential, and ground-breaking philosophers in history – changed the way we think about we’re all capable of.

Immanuel kant philosophy