Kant's career in German idealism
pp. 15-33
in: Matthew C. Altman (ed), The Palgrave handbook of German idealism, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
Immanuel Kant helped launch "the next big thing" in German Idealism during the summer of 1791, two months after celebrating his sixty-seventh birthday. It had been ten years since the publication of his long-awaited Critique of Pure Reason, and the past decade had been filled with a remarkable output of writings developing Kant's "critical philosophy," including his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), as well as an important second edition of the first Critique (1787). Although the first Critique lacked sympathetic and competent early readers, support for his philosophical innovations widened steadily during the 1780s, and a growing stream of pilgrims began to make their way to Königsberg, a city of fifty thousand souls lying in the far northeastern corner of Europe.1
