Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (German pronunciation: (22 April 1724 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher from

m Knigsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enligh tenment. At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences (for exampl e, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) using reason and logic. This stood in sharp contrast to the skepticism and lack of agreement or progres s in empiricist philosophy. Kant s magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculatio n where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile th eories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley an d Hume. Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astro nomy, and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der p raktischen Vernunft, 1788) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sit ten, 1797), which dealt with ethics. And the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Ur teilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology. He aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and in nate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without app lying it to experience will only lead to theoretical illusions. The free and pro per exercise of reason by the individual was both a theme of the Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of philosophy. His ideas influenced many thinkers in Germany during his lifetime. He settled an d moved philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. T he philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer amended and developed the Kantian system, thus bringing about various forms of German idealism. He is seen as a major figure in the history and development of philosophy. German and European thinking progressed after his time, and his influence still inspires ph ilosophical work today. James Matthew Barrie Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM (9 May 1860 19 June 1937) was a Scottish author and dramatist, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan. The ch ild of a family of small-town weavers, he was educated in Scotland. He moved to London, where he developed a career as a novelist and playwright. There he met t he Llewelyn Davies boys who inspired him in writing about a baby boy who has mag ical adventures in Kensington Gardens (included in The Little White Bird), then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a "fairy play" about this a geless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy s etting of Neverland. This play quickly overshadowed his previous work and althou gh he continued to write successfully, it became his best-known work, credited w ith popularising the name Wendy, which was very uncommon previously. Barrie unof ficially adopted the Davies boys following the deaths of their parents. Before h is death, he gave the rights to the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospi tal, which continues to benefit from them. The first appearance of Peter Pan came in The Little White Bird, which was seria lised in the United States, then published in a single volume in the UK in 1902. Barrie's most famous and enduring work, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow

Up, had its first stage performance on 27 December 1904. This play introduced a udiences to the name Wendy, which was inspired by a young girl, Margaret Henley, who called Barrie 'Friendy', but could not pronounce her Rs very well and so it came out as 'Fwendy'. It has been performed innumerable times since then, was d eveloped by Barrie into the 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, and has been adapted by others into feature films, musicals, and more. The Bloomsbury scenes show the so cietal constraints of late Victorian middle-class domestic reality, contrasted w ith Neverland, a world where morality is ambivalent. George Bernard Shaw's descr iption of the play as "ostensibly a holiday entertainment for children but reall y a play for grown-up people", suggests deeper social allegories at work in Pete r Pan. Barrie used his considerable income to help finance the production of commercial ly unsuccessful stage productions. Along with a number of other playwrights, he was involved in the 1909 and 1911 attempts to challenge the censorship of the th eatre by the Lord Chamberlain.