Laughter is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.
immanuel Kantquotes
1724 - 1804
The great German-Philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) initiated a revolution in philosophical thought with his famous work, Critique of Pure Reason. Arguably one of the greatest philosophers of all time, Kant not only influenced the thinkers of the Enlightenment, but all subsequent philosophies in Western thought as well.
Kant earned his doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Konigsberg. He was denied professorship there again and again, but refused to accept prestigious teaching offers elsewhere because he was content with his simple life in the small city. He worked as a lecturer and tutor for 15 years until he became a full professor and spent the rest of his career teaching metaphysics and logic.
Other notable works include his Critique of Practical Reason and his Critique of Judgment.
While Kant published hundreds of papers and critiques over his lifetime, his strongest contribution to philosophy was his focus on ethics and the study of moral actions. He synthesized two opposing theories, rationalism and empiricism, and found a middle ground of thought between them.
He argued for a radical idea that, as individuals, our minds organize our experiences to make sense of how the world works. He believed that reason could not prove or disprove theories of God, freedom or immortality since those ideas exist beyond the scope of human experience. But he held they were good and rational beliefs since they contributed to an orderly and moral society.
Committed to his work, Kant never married, and despite an embittering loss of memory, he continued to write until his dying day.
Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.
The touchstone of everything that can be concluded as a law for a people lies in the question whether the people could have imposed such a law on itself.
Art is purposiveness without purpose.
If adversity and hopeless grief have quite taken away the taste for life; if an unfortunate man, strong of soul and more indignant about his fate than despondent or dejected, wishes for death and yet preserves his life without loving it, not from inclination or fear but from duty, then his maxim has moral content.
duty / grief / maxim / unfortunate
High towers, and metaphysically-great men resembling them, round both of which there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos, the bottom-land, of experience; and the word transcendental, does not signify something passing beyond all experience, but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make cognition of experience possible.
But, above all, it will confer an inestimable benefit on morality and religion, by showing that all the objections urged against them may be silenced for ever by the Socratic method, that is to say, by proving the ignorance of the objector.
Man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will: he must in all his actions, whether they are directed to himself or to other rational beings, always be viewed at the same time as an end.
It is of great consequence to have previously determined the concept that one wants to elucidate through observation before questioning experience about it; for one finds in experience what one needs only if one knows in advance what to look for.
Give me matter and i will build a world out of it.