Kant argued that experience depends on forms and concepts contributed by knowers, while reason's limits make room for practical autonomy and universal moral obligation.
Intellectual setting
Kant synthesized and challenged rationalist, empiricist, scientific, and religious inheritances in the Prussian Enlightenment while also reproducing racial hierarchies that require critical examination.
Key ideas
Transcendental idealism
Human knowledge concerns appearances structured by our forms of intuition and understanding, not things as they are independently.
Autonomy
Moral agents bind themselves through principles they can will as universal, rather than merely following appetite or external command.
Legacy
His critical philosophy reorganized debates in metaphysics, knowledge, ethics, aesthetics, politics, and history, becoming a central point of departure for later European thought and its critics.