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.
William Motherby
William Motherby (1776–1847) was the originator of the idea of an annual midday meal to celebrate Immanuel Kant on Kant's birthday, which is shared by members of the Society of Kant's Friends on 22 April every year. Till 1944 it was held in Königsberg. After the war it moved to Göttingen and, in 1976, to Mainz. In 2008 the celebration returned to the city now known as Kaliningrad, where it has been held annually since, now attended by Kant's admirers from a number of countries.