He was baptized as 'Emanuel' but later changed his name to 'Immanuel' after he learned Hebrew. He was the fourth of eleven children (five of whom reached adulthood). His father, Johann Georg Kant, was a German craftsman and harness maker from Memel, Prussia his mother, Anna Regina Porter, was born in Nuremberg, but was the daughter of a Scottish saddle and harness maker. He spent his entire life in and around his hometown, never traveling more than a hundred miles from K�nigsberg. Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 in the city of K�nigsberg (then the capital of Prussia, now modern-day Kaliningrad, Russia).

His ideas and original thought have informed almost every philosophical movement since, and he continues to challenge and influence philosophy (in both the Analytic and Continental Philosophy camps) to this day. His works, especially those on Epistemology, Metaphysics and Ethics, such as his masterworks the 'Critique of Pure Reason' and the 'Critique of Practical Reason', achieved a complete paradigm shift and moved philosophy beyond the debate between the Rationalists and Empiricists which had dominated the Age of Reason and the early Age of Enlightenment, and indeed to combine those two apparently contradictory doctrines. He was the starting point and inspiration for the German Idealism movement in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, and more specifically for the Kantianism which grew up around him in his own lifetime. He is regarded as one of the most important thinkers of modern Europe, and his influence on Western thought is immeasurable. Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) was a German philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. By Individual Philosopher > Immanuel Kant

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