Editing German philosophy (section)

==18th century==
===Wolff===
[[Christian Wolff (philosopher)|Christian Wolff]] (1679–1754) was the most eminent German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant. His main achievement was a complete ''oeuvre'' on almost every scholarly subject of his time, displayed and unfolded according to his demonstrative-deductive, mathematical method, which perhaps represents the peak of [[The Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] [[rationality]] in [[Germany]].

Wolff was one of the first to use German as a language of scholarly instruction and research, although he also wrote in Latin, so that an international audience could, and did, read him. A founding father of, among other fields, [[economics]] and [[public administration]] as academic disciplines, he concentrated especially in these fields, giving advice on practical matters to people in government, and stressing the professional nature of university education.

===Kant===
[[File:Immanuel Kant portrait c1790.jpg|thumb|upright|Immanuel Kant]]
In 1781, [[Immanuel Kant]] (1724–1804) published his ''[[Critique of Pure Reason]]'', in which he attempted to determine what we can and cannot know through the use of reason independent of all experience. Briefly, he came to the conclusion that we could come to know an external world through experience, but that what we could know about it was limited by the limited terms in which the mind can think: if we can only comprehend things in terms of cause and effect, then we can only know causes and effects. It follows from this that we can know the form of all possible experience independent of all experience, but nothing else, but we can never know the world from the "standpoint of nowhere" and therefore we can never know the world in its entirety, neither via reason nor experience.

Since the publication of his ''Critique'', Immanuel Kant has been considered one of the greatest influences in all of western philosophy. In the late 18th and early 19th century, one direct line of influence from Kant is [[German Idealism]].