How Did Immanuel Kant Contribute To The Enlightenment

Considered one of the world’s greatest philosophers, Immanuel Kant revolutionize thinking of his time and sparked the end of the Enlightenment and into modern thought. His influence is so great, philosophy is divided into pre-Kantian and post-Kantian schools of thought. Outside of philosophy, Kant's essays on the meaning of Enlightenment have been hugely influential in for many years and brought his name to the World. Kant was born in Konigsberg, then the capital of Prussia, but now a Russian exclave and it was renamed Kaliningrad at the end of World War II when the city was occupied by Soviet forces. Even by the standards of his own time, Kant was extremely unworldly, he never travelled more than 100 miles from his hometown, and almost his

Kant studied literature, philosophy and natural science at the University of Konigsberg. He did not complete his degree, however, and there is speculation that he was forced out of the university because of his sympathy with Leibniz's thought. After three years working as a private tutor he was able to return to the university and complete his degree and commence work as a lecturer. Kant's career progressed slowly. He wrote prolifically, initially in Latin, then in his native German, but his work did not receive wide distribution (not least because in one case his publisher went bankrupt). He also found his progress was slowed by the demands of teaching and the necessity of earning a living. He was finally given a salaried position in 1770 and he was able to devote himself more fully to philosophy. It still took him another decade, however, too complete and finally publish Critique of Pure Reason, the work which established him as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Kant himself described the work as producing the philosophical equivalent of the so-called Copernican Revolution because it reversed the usual assumption that the apprehension of empirical sense-data necessarily precedes the production of the concepts we assign to them. After his First Critique,