Kant, Immanuel

Kant, Immanuel (b Königsberg, East Prussia [now Kaliningrad, Russia], 22 Apr. 1724; d Königsberg, 12 Feb. 1804).
German philosopher. Kant spent all his life in provincial Königsberg, where he was appointed professor of logic and metaphysics at the university in 1770. He is widely regarded as ‘the greatest philosopher of the last three hundred years’ (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy) and his broad-ranging writings were enormously influential; in the words of Roger Scruton (The Aesthetics of Architecture, 1979), his ‘division of the mental faculties, into theoretical, practical and aesthetic (or, as he put it, understanding, practical reason and judgement), provided the starting point for all later investigations, and gave to aesthetics the central position in philosophy which it occupied through much of the nineteenth century’. Kant's writings on aesthetics are principally in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgement, 1790), the third of his three great systematic treatises.