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.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher. He was the last of the great system-builders in Western philosophy. He was born on 27 August 1770 in Stuttgart in southern Germany. His father was a civil servant. His mother taught him Latin before he started school but died when he was eleven. He had one sister, Christiane, who became very close to him. Hegel studied philosophy and theology at the University of Tübingen. There he became friends with two other young men who would become famous: the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosopher Friedrich Schelling. The three were excited by the French Revolution, which broke out in 1789 when Hegel was nineteen. For years Hegel struggled to find an academic post. He worked as a private tutor in Switzerland, then in Frankfurt. In 1801 he became an unpaid lecturer at the University of Jena. There he wrote his first major book, the Phenomenology of Spirit. He famously finished the manuscript on the same day Napoleon's army arrived in the city in October 1806. The book was published in 1807. Hegel's career then bounced around. He worked as a newspaper editor in Bamberg, then as a high school principal in Nuremberg. He married Marie von Tucher in 1811. In 1816 he became a professor at Heidelberg, then at Berlin from 1818. By the 1820s he was the most famous philosopher in Germany. His lectures filled large halls. He died of illness, possibly cholera, on 14 November 1831 in Berlin, aged 61.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, and classicist. He was one of the most influential and most misunderstood thinkers of the 19th century. He was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, a small village in Prussia. His father was a Lutheran pastor who died when Friedrich was four. His grandfather and great-grandfather were also pastors. He grew up in a household of women: his mother, sister, and two aunts. He was a brilliant student. At 24, before he had even finished his doctorate, he was offered the chair of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He held this post for ten years. His first major book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), was a study of Greek culture that was considered wildly unorthodox by other classical scholars. His academic career stalled. Health problems forced him to retire at 35. He spent the next decade as a wandering philosopher, moving between Switzerland, Italy, and France. He wrote his major works in this period: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). He was almost unknown during his lifetime. His books sold poorly. In January 1889, in Turin, Italy, Nietzsche collapsed in the street. He had a complete mental breakdown. He spent the last eleven years of his life in the care of his mother and then his sister, unable to work or speak coherently. He died on 25 August 1900, aged 55. After his death, his sister Elisabeth edited his unpublished notes to push them in a nationalist and antisemitic direction. She aligned his legacy with the rising German right and later with the Nazis, despite the fact that Nietzsche himself had opposed antisemitism sharply.

Edmund Husserl was a German philosopher. He is the founder of phenomenology, one of the most important schools of twentieth-century thought. He was born on 8 April 1859 in Prossnitz, a town in Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire (today Prostějov in the Czech Republic). His family was Jewish and middle class. They spoke German rather than Czech. His father ran a business. As a young man, he studied mathematics in Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna. He earned a doctorate in mathematics in 1883. He could have had a career as a mathematician. But he became interested in deeper questions: what does it mean to know something? What are the foundations of mathematics itself? In 1884, he attended lectures by the philosopher Franz Brentano in Vienna and was so impressed that he switched to philosophy. He taught at the University of Halle from 1887. In 1891 he published Philosophy of Arithmetic. The mathematician Gottlob Frege criticised it sharply. The criticism pushed Husserl in new directions. In 1900-1901 he published Logical Investigations, the work that founded phenomenology. He taught at Göttingen from 1901 to 1916, then at Freiburg from 1916 to 1928. Many of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century were his students or were shaped by his work. In 1933 the Nazis came to power. Although Husserl had converted to Lutheran Protestantism in 1887, the Nazi racial laws still classified him as Jewish. He was banned from his own university library. He died on 27 April 1938 in Freiburg, aged 79.