Immanual Kant 1724-1803 German philosopher

Kant was trained in the tradition of Leibniz but his philosophic work is in part a reaction against Berkeley and Hume. Berkeley and Hume claimed that a person's experience of the physical world depends entirely on the person as a perceiver. Kant held that a person's experience of the world depended both on the properties of world and on the properties of the person as a perceiver. Thus, he believed that the world external to the individual provides sensory data and that the individual organizes this sensory data by imposing space and time on it. Thus, space and time for Kant are subjective, not aspect of "the world out there." Kant had an important influence on Hegel.

Kant's life was spectacularly uneventful. He lived his entire life in or near the Prussian town of Konigsberg. He arose at five each morning and studied for two hours. He then gave two hours of lectures and returned to his studies until one. At one, he had lunch, changing restaurants frequently to avoid crowds who would come to catch sight of him. In the afternoon, he would walk for an hour. It was said that people would set their clocks by the time he passed their house on his daily walk. In the evening, he would prepare his lectures for the next day and retire by nine or ten in the evening. He never married.