Thinkers Timeline

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher. He is one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Western philosophy. He was born on 22 April 1724 in Königsberg, a city in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). His family was Lutheran and not wealthy. His father was a saddle-maker. His mother, who died when he was 13, was a strong early influence and encouraged his studies. He studied at the University of Königsberg from the age of 16. He worked for several years as a private tutor for noble families before returning to the university as a lecturer in 1755. He became a full professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. He stayed in Königsberg his whole life. He is said never to have travelled more than about 150 kilometres from his birthplace. His daily routine was famously strict: neighbours were said to set their watches by his afternoon walks. For most of his career he was a respected but not famous teacher. Then, starting in his late fifties, he wrote a series of huge books that changed philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of Judgement (1790) set out a new system. He wrote important shorter works on ethics, religion, politics, and history. He continued writing until his death on 12 February 1804, aged 79. His work is hugely influential, but parts of it are also troubling. He wrote racist statements about non-European peoples. These texts sat alongside his claims about universal human dignity. Modern scholarship has taken this tension seriously, and honest study of Kant now includes this difficulty.

Volodymyr Ivanovych Vernadsky (in Russian: Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky) was a mineralogist, geochemist, and philosopher of science. He helped found three modern scientific disciplines: geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology. He was born in 1863 in Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire. His father, Ivan Vernadsky, came from a Ukrainian Cossack family and had been a professor of political economy in Kyiv before moving to Saint Petersburg. His mother was a Russian noblewoman. Vernadsky himself spent much of his childhood in Ukraine and considered himself Ukrainian by descent. He studied natural sciences at the University of Saint Petersburg, then did postgraduate work in mineralogy and crystallography in Italy and France, including study under leading European chemists. He returned to Russia and built one of the first geochemistry research programmes in the world. He read widely across science and philosophy and corresponded with major scientists across Europe, including Marie Curie. His political life was complicated. He was a liberal in tsarist Russia, a member of the constitutional democratic party, and briefly served in a 1917 provisional government. After the Bolshevik revolution, he chose to stay in Soviet science. In 1918 he played a leading role in founding the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kyiv and became its first president. He published his most important work, The Biosphere, in 1926. He continued to lead Soviet scientific institutions until his death in Moscow in 1945, aged 81. His ideas about the biosphere and the noosphere have shaped modern environmental science.