Immanuel Kant was a philosopher who tried to work out how human beings could be good and kind outside of the exhortations and blandishments of traditional religions. He was born in 1724 in the Baltic city of Königsberg, which at that time was part of Prussia and now belongs to Russia, renamed Kaliningrad. Kant’s parents were very modest. His father was a saddlemaker. Kant never had much money, a fact he dealt with cheerfully by living very modestly. It wasn’t until he was in his fifties that he became a fully salaried professor and attained a moderate degree of prosperity.

Family Background and Personal Life

His family was deeply religious and very strict. Later in life, Kant did not have any conventional religious beliefs, but he was acutely aware of just how much religion had contributed to his parent’s ability to cope with all the hardships of their existence and how useful religion could be in fostering social cohesion and community. Kant was physically very slight, frail, and anything but good-looking, yet he was very sociable, and some of his colleagues used to criticize him for going to too many parties. When eventually he was able to entertain, he had rules about conversation at his table.

At the start of a dinner party, he decreed that people should swap stories about what had been happening recently. Then there should be a major phase of reflective discourse, in which those present attempt to clarify an important topic. And finally, there should be a closing period of hilarity so that everyone is left in a good mood. He died in 1804, in his eightieth year in Konigsberg, having rarely felt the need to spend any time outside the city in which he was born.

Kant and the Age of Enlightenment

Kant was writing at a highly interesting period in history we now know as the Enlightenment. In an essay called What is Enlightenment? published in 1784, Kant proposed that the identifying feature of his age was its growing secularism. Intellectually, Kant welcomed the declining belief in........

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