Immanuel Kant
Kant was born on April 22, 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in Königsberg, East Prussia. Baptized 'Emanuel', he later changed his name to 'Immanuel' after learning Hebrew. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Kant maintained Christian ideals for some time, but struggled to reconcile the faith with his belief in science. In his "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals", he reveals a belief in immortality as the necessary condition of humanity's approach to the highest morality possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic.
A priori and a posteriori
The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1781) advocated a blend of rationalist and empiricist theories. Kant says, "Although all our cognition begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises [is caused by] from experience" According to Kant, "a priori" cognition is transcendental, or based on the "form" of all possible experience, while "a posteriori" cognition is empirical, based on the "content" of experience. Kant states, "[…] it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself sensuous impressions [sense data] giving merely the "occasion" [opportunity for a cause to produce its effect]." Contrary to contemporary usages of the term, Kant thinks that "a priori" knowledge is not entirely independent of the content of experience. And unlike the rationalists, Kant thinks that "a priori" cognition, in its pure form, that is without the admixture of any empirical content, is limited to the deduction of the conditions of possible experience. These "a priori", or transcendental conditions, are seated in one's cognitive faculties, and are not provided by experience in general or any experience in particular (although an argument exists that "a priori" intuitions can be "triggered" by experience).