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.
Immanuel Kant
Kant wrote a book discussing his theory of virtue in terms of independence which he believed was "a viable modern alternative to more familiar Greek views about virtue". This book is often criticized for its hostile tone and for not articulating his thoughts about autocracy comprehensibly. In the self-governance model of Aristotelian virtue, the non-rational part of the soul can be made to listen to reason through training. Although Kantian self-governance appears to involve "a rational crackdown on appetites and emotions" with lack of harmony between reason and emotion, Kantian virtue denies requiring "self-conquest, self-suppression, or self-silencing". They dispute that "the self-mastery constitutive of virtue is ultimately mastery over our tendency of will to give priority to appetite or emotion unregulated by duty, it does not require extirpating, suppressing, or silencing sensibility in general".