Immanuel Kant

An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment?"

"Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?" (German: "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?") is the title of a 1784 essay by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. In the December 1784 publication of the Berlinische Monatsschrift (Berlin Monthly), edited by Friedrich Gedike and Johann Erich Biester, Kant replied to the question posed a year earlier by the Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner, who was also an official in the Prussian government. Zöllner's question was addressed to a broad intellectual public, in reply to Biester's essay entitled: "Proposal, not to engage the clergy any longer when marriages are conducted" (April 1783) and a number of leading intellectuals replied with essays, of which Kant's is the most famous and has had the most impact. Kant's opening paragraph of the essay is a much-cited definition of a lack of Enlightenment as people's inability to think for themselves due not to their lack of intellect, but lack of courage.

The Critique of Judgement

"Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement, also known as the third critique, simultaneously completes Kant's Critical project and lays the foundations for modern aesthetics. The standard English translation is the one made by James Creed Meredith. The book is divided into two main sections, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the Critique of Teleological Judgement, and also includes a large overview of the entirety of the Critical system, arranged in its final form. The Critique of Judgement constitutes a discussion of the place of Judgement itself, which must overlap both the Understanding (which proceeds within the determinist camp) and Reason (which exploits the camp of spontaneity)."

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