Immanuel Kant

Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, and his recurring question "What is man?" as the horizon of his three Critiques, mark the field's acknowledged starting point.

Kant lectured on physical geography at Konigsberg for over four decades, the longest-running course of his career, and treated it as part of the same anthropological/empirical project as his critical philosophy.

The Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason, arguing space and time are a priori forms of intuition rather than things or relations in themselves, is the field's most cited single position.

Kant credited Hume's skepticism about causation and induction with interrupting his own dogmatic slumber, and wrote the Critique of Pure Reason partly to answer it by grounding causation in the mind's own structuring of experience rather than in either pure reason or habit alone.

Schopenhauer identifies Kant's thing in itself with Will, rejecting a causal reading of the noumenal and phenomenal relation, a reinterpretation rather than a straightforward continuation of Kant's own position.

Schiller's aesthetic writings begin from Kant's Critique of Judgment, which he engaged critically rather than simply accepted.

Hegel's dialectic develops directly out of a critique of Kant's fixed categories and his sharp separation of appearances from things in themselves.

Goethe was highly ambivalent about Kant, dismissing the Critique of Pure Reason as a dungeon restraining free inquiry while praising the Critique of Judgment for treating nature and art as each purposive in themselves, an idea that shaped his own morphological method.

Kant is standardly credited as the movement's originating figure through the Critique of Pure Reason's transcendental idealism, even though he is not himself always classified as a German Idealist in the narrower sense reserved for Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; this atlas already carries Kant's own tradition fact as German Idealism.