Immanuel Kant (; ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a
German philosopher who is considered the central figure of
modern philosophy. Kant argued that fundamental concepts of the human mind structure human experience, that
reason is the source of
morality, that
aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested
judgment, that
space and
time are forms of our understanding, and that the world as it is
"in-itself" is unknowable. Kant took himself to have effected a
Copernican revolution in
philosophy, akin to
Copernicus' reversal of the
age-old belief that the
sun revolved around the
earth. His beliefs continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of
metaphysics,
epistemology,
ethics,
political theory, and
aesthetics.
