A sketch of Immanuel Kant's life takes very little space. Except for a conflict with the royal censor over his writings on religion, he led the quiet life of a faculty member within a small eighteenth-century European university. He was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, 22 April 1724, and he died there 12 February 1804, never having left the Königsberg area, where he taught first as a private tutor and then, for some twenty-five years, served as Professor of Logic and Metaphysics. So influential have been his publications, however, that, like Plato before him, no one after him could do philosophy without taking him into account. Even today his remains the premier moral theory. Although his political philosophy has not had the same impact as his ethical doctrines, it did anticipate the classical liberalism underlying republican forms of government today.
(Roger J. Sullivan, "Introduction," in The Metaphysics of Morals, by Immanuel Kant, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed. Karl Ameriks and Desmond M. Clarke [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], vii-xxvi, at vii)
