Immanuel Kant Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===Early work=== Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the [[Prussian Academy of Sciences|Berlin Academy]] about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's [[tidal locking]] to [[orbital resonance|coincide]] with the Earth's rotation.{{efn|Kant himself seems to have found his contribution not significant enough that he published his arguments in a newspaper commentary on the prize question and did not submit them to the Academy: {{cite book|chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.54018/page/n113/mode/2up|chapter=Whether the Earth has Undergone an Alteration of its Axial Rotation|title=Kant's Cosmogony|translator-last=Hastie|translator-first=William|location=Glasgow|publisher=James Maclehose|orig-date=1754|year=1900|pages=1–11|access-date=29 March 2022}}. The prize was instead awarded in 1756 to P. Frisi, who incorrectly argued against the slowing down of the spin.<ref>{{cite book |last=Schönfeld |first=Martin |title=The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project |publisher=Oxford University Press |page=84 |isbn=978-0-19-513218-2 |year=2000 }}</ref>}}<ref name="nebulous">{{cite book|last=Brush|first=Stephen G.|title=A History of Modern Planetary Physics: Nebulous Earth|year=2014|isbn=978-0-521-44171-1|page=[https://archive.org/details/historyofmodernp0000brus/page/7 7]|publisher=Cambridge University Press |url=https://archive.org/details/historyofmodernp0000brus/page/7}}</ref> The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the [[formation and evolution of the Solar System]] in his ''[[Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens]]''.<ref name="nebulous"/> In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic, and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the [[Coriolis force]]. In 1756, Kant also published three papers on the [[1755 Lisbon earthquake]].<ref>See: * Kant, I. (1756a) [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951001073880s;view=1up;seq=448 "Von den Ursachen der Erderschütterungen bei Gelegenheit des Unglücks, welches die westliche Länder von Europa gegen das Ende des vorigen Jahres betroffen hat"] [On the causes of the earthquakes on the occasion of the disaster which affected the western countries of Europe towards the end of last year] In: Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences), ed.s (1902) ''Kant's gesammelte Schriften'' [Kant's collected writings] (in German) Berlin, Germany: G. Reimer. vol. 1, pp. 417–427. * Kant, I. (1756b) [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951001073880s;view=1up;seq=460 "Geschichte und Naturbeschreibung der merkwürdigsten Vorfälle des Erdbebens, welches an dem Ende des 1755sten Jahres einen großen Theil der Erde erschüttert hat"] [History and description of the nature of the most remarkable events of the earthquake which shook a large part of the Earth at the end of the year 1755], ibid. pp. 429–461. * Kant, I. (1756c) [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951001073880s;view=1up;seq=494 "Immanuel Kants fortgesetzte Betrachtung der seit einiger Zeit wahrgenommenen Erderschütterungen"] [Immanuel Kant's continued consideration of the earthquakes that were felt some time ago], ibid. pp. 463–472. * Amador, Filomena (2004) "The causes of 1755 Lisbon earthquake on Kant" In: Escribano Benito, J.J.; Español González, L.; Martínez García, M.A., ed.s. ''Actas VIII Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas'' [Proceedings of the Eighth Congress of the Spanish Society of the History of the Sciences and Technology] (in English) Logroño, Spain: Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas (Universidad de la Rioja), vol. 2, pp. 485–495.</ref> Kant's theory, which involved shifts in huge caverns filled with hot gases, though inaccurate, was one of the first systematic attempts to explain earthquakes in natural rather than supernatural terms. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject.<ref name="Richards-1974">{{Cite journal|last=Richards|first=Paul|date=1974|title=Kant's Geography and Mental Maps|journal=Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers|issue=61|pages=1–16|doi=10.2307/621596|jstor=621596}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Elden|first=Stuart|date=2009|title=Reassessing Kant's geography|journal=Journal of Historical Geography|language=en|volume=35|issue=1|pages=3–25|doi=10.1016/j.jhg.2008.06.001|url=http://dro.dur.ac.uk/6836/1/6836.pdf|access-date=27 September 2019|archive-date=1 August 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200801205430/http://dro.dur.ac.uk/6836/1/6836.pdf|url-status=live}}</ref> Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and, in 1802, a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, ''Physical Geography'', was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics, and anthropology, along with other topics.<ref name="Richards-1974" /> [[File:Kant wohnhaus 2.jpg|thumb|Kant's house in Königsberg in an 1842 painting]] In the ''Universal Natural History'', Kant laid out the [[nebular hypothesis]], in which he deduced that the [[Solar System]] had formed from a large cloud of gas, a [[nebula]]. Kant also correctly deduced that the [[Milky Way]] was a [[galaxy|large disk of stars]], which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms.<ref>{{cite book|last=Gamow|first=George|title=One Two Three... Infinity|location=New York|publisher=Viking P.|date=1947|pages=300ff|title-link=One Two Three... Infinity}}</ref> From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. ''[[The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures]]'', a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: ''Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy'' and ''[[The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God]]''. By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote ''[[Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime]]''; he was second to [[Moses Mendelssohn]] in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his ''Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality'' (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote a critical piece on [[Emanuel Swedenborg]]'s ''Dreams of a Spirit-Seer''. In 1770, Kant was appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his [[inaugural dissertation]] ''On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World''{{efn|Since he had written his last [[habilitation thesis]] 14 years earlier, a new habilitation thesis was required (see S.J. McGrath, Joseph Carew (eds.), ''Rethinking German Idealism'', Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 24).}} This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of [[subreption]], and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish. It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50's after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.<ref>Cf., for example, Susan Shell, ''The Embodiment of Reason'' (Chicago, 1996)</ref> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page