Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (; ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher who is a central figure in modern philosophy. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, he argued that space, time and causation are mere sensibilities; "things-in-themselves" exist, but their nature is unknowable. In his view, the mind shapes and structures experience, with all human experience sharing certain structural features. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposition that worldly objects can be intuited "a priori" ("beforehand"), and that intuition is therefore independent from objective reality. Kant believed that reason is the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics.
Hermann Kant
In his first novel, "The Aula" (1965), Kant described his own experiences at the "Workers and Peasants Faculty." In the book, the closure of the faculty is an occasion for a graduation, for which the main character is to deliver a speech, which determines the fate of their fellow students and thus a part of their own lives in the early days of East Germany. "Kant's most famous and best novel" made him famous overnight in both the East and the West, while the book also being considered controversial in both German states. In East Germany most viewed the book as a "partisan commitment" of Kantian protagonists devoted to the "socialist movement", Marcel Reich-Ranicki remarked that Kant was too timid to write about the real conditions that existed in East Germany.