Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was an idealist and Enlightenment philosopher from Königsberg in Prussia (now Kaliningrad in Russia). Kant's philosophy is set against that of David Hume's empiricism and Gottfried Leibniz's rationalism. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant tries to overcome both of these positions and forge a philosophy suitable for the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that took inspiration from the success of science in the preceding two centuries, and from the decline in the power of the Church. This optimistic age of philosophy held to individual autonomy and freedom of choice, believing that political freedom could follow intellectual freedom. Sapere aude! ('dare to know') was the motto that Kant gave in What is Enlightenment?.