Kant, Immanuel

Kant has had a greater influence than any other philosopher of modern times. His philosophy, which makes the nature of the self-conscious mind the foundation of all knowledge, was the inspiration for the school known as German Idealism, whose chief representatives were Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel. They were united in aiming to salvage Kant’s basic insights while overcoming the oppositions of his philosophy between the thing in itself and the thing for us; concepts and intuitions; and moral duty and inclination. In turn, Hegel’s philosophy was the basis for Marxism. Kant’s transcendental dialectic was the immediate predecessor of the dialectical methods used by Hegel and Marx. His work also influenced Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and was the basis for the “neo-Kantian” movement in philosophy in late 19th-century Germany. In the 20th century, Kant’s influence was extraordinarily widespread. Among the thinkers who have developed and adapted Kant’s ideas in their thought are the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Popper, Peter Strawson, and John Rawls, the social theorists Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Jürgen Habermas, the historians of science Georges Canguilhem and Thomas Kuhn, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the psychologist Jean Piaget.