Immanuel Kant (/kænt/;[15] German: [ʔɪˈmaːnu̯ eːl ˈkant, -nu̯ ɛl -];[16][17] 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was an

influential German philosopher[18] in the Age of Enlightenment. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, he
argued that space, time, and causation are mere sensibilities; "things-in-themselves" exist, but their nature is
unknowable.[19][20] In his view, the mind shapes and structures experience, with all human experience sharing
certain structural features. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposition that worldly
objects can be intuited a priori ('beforehand'), and that intuition is therefore independent from objective
reality.[21] Kant believed that reason is the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of
disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy,
especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics.
In one of Kant's major works, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781),[22] he attempted to explain the relationship
between reason and human experience and to move beyond the failures of traditional philosophy
and metaphysics. Kant wanted to put an end to an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience,
while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as David Hume. Kant regarded himself as showing the way past
the impasse between rationalists and empiricists which philosophy had led to,[23] and is widely held to have
synthesized both traditions in his thought.[24]
Kant was an exponent of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured through
universal democracy and international cooperation. He believed that this would be the eventual outcome
of universal history, although it is not rationally planned.[25] The nature of Kant's religious ideas continues to be
the subject of philosophical dispute, with viewpoints ranging from the impression that he was an initial
advocate of atheism who at some point developed an ontological argumentfor God, to more critical
treatments epitomized by Nietzsche, who claimed that Kant had "theologian blood"[26] and was merely a
sophisticated apologist for traditional Christian faith.[a]
Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These
include the Universal Natural History (1755), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the Metaphysics of
Morals (1797), and the Critique of Judgment (1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology.

Despite being a well-known Philosopher, his early works focused more on geology,
astronomy, and physics. In his 1755 work, “The Universal Natural History and Theories
of the Heavens,” Kant talks about astronomy and two noteworthy theories about the
Heavens. The first is his “Nebular Hypothesis” on star and planetary formations, where
he theorized that thin, dim clouds of dust and gas out in the cosmos would collapse in on
themselves under the force of gravity, causing them to spin to form a disk. From this
spinning disk, stars and planets would form, and from this type of formation, the rotation
of Earth and the other planets would be explained.
Solar nebula, gaseous cloud from which, in the so-called nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar
system, the Sun and planets formed by condensation. Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg in
1734 proposed that the planets formed out of a nebular crust that had surrounded the Sun and then
broken apart. In 1755 the German philosopher Immanuel Kant suggested that a nebula in slow
rotation, gradually pulled together by its own gravitational force and flattened into a spinning disk,
gave birth to the Sun and planets. A similar model, but with the planets being formed before the Sun,
was proposed by the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1796.