Immanuel Kant is feared and admired in equal measure: feared for the unforgiving complexity of his writing, and admired for his sweeping revolution in metaphysics. Famous for the Copernican Revolution in philosophy – the claim that the mind’s representations of the world are logically prior to the objects of which they are representations – Kant’s philosophy heralds the birth of modernity. In this talk, I survey the key points of Kant’s work and demonstrate how they have filtered down through the centuries into almost every facet of philosophy and life. From ethics and aesthetics to mathematics and metaphysics, Kant’s influence is everywhere, especially where we do not expect it, such as in the work of Jean Baudrillard and our conception of liberalism. If all philosophy is just footnotes to Plato, then all of life is just a footnote to Kant.
