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.
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science () is a book by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, published in 1783, two years after the first edition of his "Critique of Pure Reason". One of Kant's shorter works, it contains a summary of the "Critique"‘s main conclusions, sometimes by arguments Kant had not used in the "Critique". Kant characterizes his more accessible approach here as an "analytic" one, as opposed to the "Critique"‘s "synthetic" examination of successive faculties of the mind and their principles.