Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) spent all of his life in Knigsberg, a small German town on the Baltic Sea in East Prussia. (After World War II, Germany's border was pushed west, so Knigsberg is now called Kaliningrad and is part of Russia.) At the age of fifty-five, Kant appeared to be a washout. He had taught at Knigsberg University for over twenty years, yet had not published any works of significance. During the last twenty-five years of his life, however, Kant left a mark on the history of philosophy that is rivaled only by such towering giants as Plato and Aristotle. Kant's three major works are often considered to be the starting points for different branches of modern philosophy: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) for the philosophy of mind; the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) for moral philosophy; and the Critique of Judgment (1790) for aesthetics, the philosophy of art. The Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals was published in 1785, just before the Critique of Practical Reason. It is essentially a short introduction to the argument presented in the second Critique. In order to understand what Kant is up to in this book, it is useful to know something about Kant's other works and about the intellectual climate of his time. Kant lived and wrote during a period in European intellectual history called the "Enlightenment." Stretching from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, this period produced the ideas about human rights and democracy that inspired the French and American revolutions. (Some other major figures of the Enlightenment were Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Leibniz.) The characteristic quality of the Enlightenment was an immense confidence in "reason"--that is, in humanity's ability to solve problems through logical analysis. The central metaphor of the Enlightenment was a notion of the light of reason dispelling the darkness of mythology and misunderstanding. Enlightenment thinker...
