Immanuel Kant was born in the city of Königsberg, East Prussia, studied at its university and worked there as a tutor and professor for more than forty years, without ever traveling more than fifty miles from home . Although his outward life was one of legendary calm and regularity, Kant's intellectual work easily justified his own claim to have effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Beginning with his inaugural Dissertation (1770) on the difference between right-handed and left-handed spatial orientations, Kant patiently developed the most comprehensive and influential philosophical program of the modern era. Its central thesis – that the possibility of human knowledge presupposes the active participation of the human mind – is deceptively simple, but the details of its application are notoriously complex. The monumental Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) (1781, 1787) fully enunciates the conditions of mathematical, scientific, and metaphysical knowledge in his "Transcendental Aesthetics," "Transcendental Analytics," and "Transcendental Dialectics," but Kant found it useful to offer a less technical exposition of the same themes in the Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (Prolegomena to any future metaphysics) (1783). Carefully distinguishing judgments as analytic or synthetic and as a priori or a posteriori, Kant argued that the most interesting and useful varieties of human knowledge are based on synthetic a priori judgments, which are, in turn, possible only when the mind determines the conditions of its functioning. own experience. It is therefore we who impose the forms of space and time on every sensation possible in mathematics, and it is we who make every experience coherent as scientific knowledge governed by traditional notions of substance and causality, applying the pure concepts of the intellect to all. possible experience. But regulative principles of this kind apply only to the world as we know it, and since metaphysical propositions seek a truth beyond all experience, they cannot be established within the limits of reason. Significant applications of these principles are expressed in Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science) (1786) and Beantwortung der Frage: Ist es eine Erfahrung, daß wir denken? (On Understanding and Transcendental Consciousness) (1788-1791). Kant's moral philosophy is developed in Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals) (1785). From the analysis of the functioning of the human will, Kant deduces the need for a perfectly universalizable moral law, expressed in a categorical imperative that must be considered binding for every agent..