Immanuel kant biography timeline with pictures

“I saw my portrait on the front of the [Allgemeine deutsche] Bibliothek. It is an honor that disturbs me a little, for, as you know, I earnestly avoid all appearance of surreptitiously seeking eulogies or ostentatiously creating a stir. The portrait is a good engraving though not a good likeness. But it pleases me to see this sort of gesture stemming from the amiable partisanship of my former students.”

— Kant’s letter to Marcus Herz[1]

Overview of the Images

We have available to us 15 original images produced by artists who had seen Kant in person[2] (open the set of images in a new window):

• five 3/4 portraits [Becker (A, B, C), Keyserling, “Dresden,” Döbler (A, B), Vernet (A, B, ...), (Stägemann[3])]
• five profiles [Collin, Lowe, Senewaldt (A, B), Schnorr, Baltruschatis]
• two full length profiles [Puttrich, Hagemann]
• three busts [Mattersberger, Bardou, Hagemann[4]]
• In addition, we have five silhouettes [associated with Hippel, Häberl, Stein, Kant’s Bible, and Kant’s Mittagsbüchlein (Aug/Sep 1802)]

The busts and larger paintings (Becker, Dresden) are all roughly life-size, the Keyserling sketch slightly smaller, and the Döbler paintings one-quarter size; the remaining images are miniatures (their relative sizes can be seen here) and a summary overview of the images (prepared in 2024) is available as a PDF. A great many other images derive from these, with varying degrees of artistic license.

A few Latin terms and abbreviations: ad vivum (from life), del. et sc. / delineavit et sculpsit (drew and engraved), fecit (made), pinx. (painted), sculp or sculps. (engraved).

Four indices help sort the images: the left window includes indices arranged by Chronology (first listing those images prepared by someone who at least had seen Kant, even if Kant might not have sat for the portrait, sculpture, or silhouette, with copi

(1724-1804)

Who Was Immanuel Kant?

While tutoring, Immanuel Kant published science papers, including "General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens" in 1755. He spent the next 15 years as a metaphysics lecturer. In 1781, he published the first part of Critique of Pure Reason. He published more critiques in the years preceding his death on February 12, 1804, in the city of his birth.

Early Life

Kant was the fourth of nine children born to Johann Georg Cant, a harness maker, and Anna Regina Cant. Later in his life, Immanuel changed the spelling of his name to Kant to to adhere to German spelling practices. Both parents were devout followers of Pietism, an 18th-century branch of the Lutheran Church. Seeing the potential in the young man, a local pastor arranged for the young Kant's education. While at school, Kant gained a deep appreciation for the Latin classics.

In 1740, Kant enrolled at the University of Konigsberg as a theology student, but was soon attracted to mathematics and physics. In 1746, his father died and he was forced to leave the university to help his family. For a decade, he worked as a private tutor for the wealthy. During this time he published several papers dealing with scientific questions exploring the middle ground between rationalism and empiricism.

Full-Fledged Scholar and Philosopher

In 1755, Immanuel Kant returned to the University of Konigsberg to continue his education. That same year he received his doctorate of philosophy. For the next 15 years, he worked as a lecturer and tutor and wrote major works on philosophy. In 1770, he became a full professor at the University of Konigsberg, teaching metaphysics and logic.

In 1781, Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason, an enormous work and one of the most important on Western thought. He attempted to explain how reason and experiences interact with thought and understanding. This revolutionary proposal explained how an individual’

This chronology of Kant’s life includes mention of his publications (with links to their fuller descriptions on the page devoted to Kant’s Writings), as well as other events significant for his life and work, including a selective listing of publications of other works in philosophy. An abridged version of this is available here as a pdf file).

For a full biography of Kant, see especially Cassirer [1918, Vorländer [1924], Kuehn [2001], and Dietzsch [2003]. An early biography written in English by Stuckenberg [1882] is of considerable interest and still worth reading. Important early biographical sources include the following: Mortzfeld [1802], Borowski [1804], Jachmann [1804], Wasianski [1804],[1] Hasse [1804], Metzger [1804a, 1804b], Reicke [1860],[2] and Rink [1805].[3] See also the biographies by Schubert [1842], Paulsen [1899], and more recently Gulyga [1977; English tr. 1987].

A brief chronology of Kant’s mental decline is available.

A list of Kant images can be found here (and a PDF summary).

A trimmed-down brief biography of Kant alongside those of the other professors at Königsberg is also available.

Helpful overviews of biographies can be found in Vorländer [1918], George [1987], and Kuehn [2001, 1-23].

Color key:

[Kant’s writings]

[Publication of select texts important for, or in response to, Kant]

[Cultural/political events of the day]

[top] [1720] [1730] [1740] [1750] [1760] [1770] [1780] [1790] [1800]

1719

(July 4) Birth of Kant’s older sister, Regina Dorothea.

1720

Posthumous publication of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Lehr-Sätze über die Monadologie, ingleichen von Gott und seiner Existentz, seinen Eigenschafften und von der Seele des Menschen (1720), as well as a German translation of

Anyone who critically engages with Kant nowadays should not ignore the philosopher’s racist remarks, however. A research project at the University of Jena is exploring the question of racism in works of classical philosophy. Kant indeed made racist remarks, but did so within the context of his time, said project leader Andrea Esser in a Deutschlandfunk interview. She emphasised that her research was not about judging individuals but about understanding “how we should deal with this legacy”. 

In future, Germany’s first Kant museum will also commemorate the “global thinker”, who was nearly 80 when he died in Königsberg on 12 February 1804. To mark the 300th anniversary of his birth, the first ever permanent exhibition about Kant, probably “the most important thinker of the Modern age”, is being created at the East Prussian state museum in Lüneburg And Kant is still sparking debate to this day. In 2024, for example, the writer Daniel Kehlmann and Omri Boehm, a philosopher who teaches in New York, jointly published “Der bestirnte Himmel über mir – Ein Gespräch über Kant” (The starry sky above me - A conversation about Kant), in which they seek important answers from Kant to topical questions. Kehlmann, who studied philosophy himself, said about Kant’s impact: “One of the greatest intellectual revolutions there has ever been in the history of our genre. That was Kant.”