The 100 most important Germans: Immanuel Kant

Imanuel Kant (* 22. April 1724 in Königsberg; † 12. Februar 1804 the very same)
Only idiots or kooky people would try to recap the whole work of this man, so I will just sum up the central points of his work:


First of all he was part of a philosophical movement, today known as The Enlightment. The basic idea of this movement was explore the world without the bonds of religious ideology, but that doesn’t mean that they were all atheists. It was more meant as a counter movement to dogmatism.

Kant asks himself four questions and tried to answer them.

1. What can I know? In his theory of awareness.
2. What should I do? In his ethics.
3. What may I hope? In his theory of religion.
4. What is the Human? In his Anthropology.

A concept created by him is the “Categorical Imperative” which was a reaction of the morals of his time and was meant as a guideline and belongs to the deontological school of Ethics. His basic statement was, that morality is driven by rationality, so right is right and wrong is wrong and the greater good is irrelevant. This leads to a objective reality, which can be examined. His “Categorical Imperative” was build on three maxims:

1. Every action you do should be based on Universality -> means, that when you are take an action you have to imagine if it would be ok when everybody else is doing the same.
2. The end is versus the means -> means, that you never manipulate anyone which include that you never should lie.
3. You should always imagine that you are the moral authority of the universe.

This is only a very very small piece of his work, we are talking here about one of the most influential philosophers of all time and when you want to read his works, you should be very patient, because it is not a very easy one.