Matthew T. Espinoza
Professor Swartz
MGMT 368
16 June 2011
Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in the capital of Prussia what is now Kaliningrad a city in Russia. As a young scholar, Kant was sent to Collegium Fredericianum before attending the University of Konigsberg by the age of 16. In 1749 Kant had his first philosophical work published, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces. In it “he argues against the vix mortix view supported by Wolff and other post-Leibnizian German rationalists that proposed that bodies have no essential force, and claimed that, instead, the existence of an essential force can be proven by metaphysical arguments”(“Thoughts on the True Estimation”).
In 1755 he became a lecturer at the University teaching on the topic of Metaphysics after winning the Berlin Academy Prize for his discovery of the retardation of the earth’s rotation in 1754. Kant eventually went on to turn his attention to philosophical issues writing a number of works throughout the 1760’s including: “The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, 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, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and then 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” (“Immanuel Kant.” Wikipedia).
In 1781 Kant put out the Critique of Pure Reason which seemed to uncomprehending to many. Therefore, he clarified his main points in Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as a Science and soon after he wrote Metaphysics of Morals, Kant's main work on the fundamental principle of morality and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural