How Did Immanuel Kant Contribute To American Rationalism

An eminent philosopher of the Enlightenment era, Immanuel Kant was born of April 22, 1724, in Konigsberg, Prussia. He was the fourth of nine children born to Anna Regina Reuter and Johann Georg Kant. He belonged to an impoverished family, his father was a harness marker, and the family offered unquestionable allegiance to the Pietism branch of the Lutheran Church. Kant was a bright child, he was placed under the tutelage of a local pastor to complete his basic education, and later he attended the Collegium Fridiricianum, a Latin school where developed a great passion for classicism. In 1740, Kant was accepted at the University of Konigsberg, he initially planned to study theology but he found his vocation in physics and mathematics. Upon his
Kant began working as a private tutor for wealthy families, and meanwhile, he began publishing papers that consisted of his analysis on empiricism and rationalism.
Kant spent the next decade exploring a centrism between rationalism and empiricism, and he sought to create an approach to deal with scientific questions by implementing both these theologies. In 1755, Kant published his highly praised and much discussed paper, “General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens”. In the same year, a friend provided him some financial assistance and he was able to resume his education at Konigsberg. He received his Ph.D. in 1756. After completing his education, Kant was offered the position of a lecturer of mathematics and sciences at the University
Kant has made immense contributions to the evolution of scientific philosophy. He is attributed for the formation of a model of individual epistemology, which he believed provided an in depth analysis of human knowledge and its limitation. He entwined the ideologies of empiricism with rationalism, and attempted to examine the limits and extents of human intelligence. He always placed much emphasis on moralities, and formed his own moral law, entitled ‘Categorical imperative’, which proposed that morality is taken from rationality and, the sense of right doing and wrong doing is only obtained from rational thinking. Kant divided moral judgments into three distinct classes: analytic a priori, synthetic a posteriori and synthetic a priori. In 1797, he published ‘Metaphysics of Ethics’, in which he developed an ethical system that proposed reasoning as the fundamental power that guides morality. He stated that reasoning necessitated the need for two essential elements of thought: the categorical and the hypothetical. While the categorical forms the ethical evaluation, the hypothetical constructs a course of action to deal with events, and these two elements serve to uphold a man’s freedom of thought and action, making him independent to act according to his will and engaging his conscience to make ethical decision keeping in mind the societal