Immanuel Kant (; German: [I'ma:nue:l kant]; 22 April 1724 - 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher who is a central figure in modern philosophy. Kant argues that the human mind creates the structure of human experience, that reason is the source of morality, that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment, that space and time are forms of human sensibility, and that the world as it is "in-itself" is independent of humanity's concepts of it. Kant took himself to have effected a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy, akin to Copernicus' reversal of the age-old belief that the sun revolves around the earth.

Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724 in Konigsberg, Prussia (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia). His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697-1737), was also born in Konigsberg to a father from Nuremberg. (Her name is sometimes erroneously given as Anna Regina Porter.) His father, Johann Georg Kant (1682-1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipeda, Lithuania). Immanuel Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish; it is more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen (today part of Priekule) and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children (four of them reached adulthood). Baptized 'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel' after learning Hebrew.  Young Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. Kant was born into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in East Prussia. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Kant maintained a belief in Christianity, in his work Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals he reveals a belief in human immortality as the necessary condition of our continued approach to the highest good possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of Theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic.  Common myths about Kant's personal mannerisms are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and disciplined life, leading to an oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life -- he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends whom he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Konigsberg.  A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) from Konigsberg his whole life. In fact, between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Gross-Arnsdorf (now Jarnoltowo near Morag (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km).

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