Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, the capital of Prussia at that time, today the city of Kaliningrad in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. He was the fourth of nine children (four of them reached adulthood). Baptized 'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel'[6] after learning Hebrew. In his entire life, he never traveled more than ten miles from Königsberg.[7] His father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harnessmaker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). His mother, Regina Dorothea Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Nuremberg.[8] Kant's paternal grandfather had emigrated from Scotland to East Prussia, and his father still spelled their family name "Cant".[9] In his youth, Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed intense religious devotion, personal humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. Consequently, Kant received a stern education – strict, punitive, and disciplinary – that preferred Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science.[10] The common myths concerning Kant's personal mannerisms are enumerated, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.[11] One of these "myths" is possible to mention in the connection with a novel Great Gatsby of Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Kant allegedly stared at a church steeple to help his concentration. Fitzgerald's figure Nick in Chapter V stares at Gatsby's house "like Kant at his church steeple."[12] It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and predictable life, leading to the oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but did not seem to lack a rewarding social life - he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works.
1915 — 2012
date of birth:
3.14.1915
date of death:
3.14.2012
Place of birth:
Königsberg
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