immanuel kant

Biography
Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, the capital of Prussia at that time, today the city of Kaliningrad in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. He was the fourth of eleven children (four of them reached adulthood). Baptized 'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel'[7] after learning Hebrew. In his entire life, he never traveled more than a hundred miles from Königsberg.[8] His father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harnessmaker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). His mother, Regina Dorothea Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Nuremberg.[9] Kant's grandfather had emigrated from Scotland to East Prussia, and his father still spelled their family name "Cant."[10] In his youth, Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. He was reared in a Pietist household that stressed intense religious devotion, personal humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. Consequently, Kant received a stern education – strict, punitive, and disciplinary – that preferred Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science.[11]
[edit] Personality
Many of the common myths concerning Kant's personal mannerisms are enumerated, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.[12] It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and predictable life, leading to the oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but didn't seem to lack a rewarding social life - he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works.