I, Kant
The philosopher sailed to the edge of reason to discover 'what can I know?'
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Next week: Mencius versus Xunzi
A WARNING: what follows is an impertinent attempt to distil in a few lines the essence of the philosophy of ‘mind’ of one of the greatest thinkers in the history of ideas, whose work has baffled generations of students and unrolled kilometres of impenetrable scholarship.
If our minds are sitting on the shoulders of this giant, at the very least we ought to consider a little of what he thought and wrote about the mind.
His name was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and he was born in Königsberg, in East Prussia (today’s Kaliningrad, in Russia), the son of a harness-maker and the sixth of nine children. He grew up in a pietist Lutheran family, humble and devout, who too…