Immanuel Kant

Transformed Western philosophy with his critical method and ethical framework

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) reshaped modern philosophy through his Copernican Revolution in epistemology. His 1781 Critique of Pure Reason proposed that human perception actively structures reality, arguing that space and time are mental frameworks rather than external absolutes.

Key contributions include:

• Categorical Imperative ethics
• Transcendental idealism
• Distinction between phenomena/noumena

Kant's moral philosophy in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) established duty-based ethics with the maxim: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

His political essays like Perpetual Peace (1795) laid groundwork for:

• International law
• Democratic peace theory
• Cosmopolitanism

Kant's aesthetic theory in Critique of Judgment (1790) influenced Romanticism by analyzing beauty and sublime experience. Contemporary neuroscience continues engaging with Kantian concepts about mind-world relationships.