Immanuel (just) Kant (even)

No more dad jokes, I promise

Good morning friends,

I hope enjoyed the brief stop we made yesterday to visit our old friend Rene Descartes.

Today we’ll be catching a flight from Descartes in France to Immanuel Kant in Germany.

Unlike Descartes who joined the army, traveled the world, studied physics, and started philosophizing in his early twenties, Immanuel Kant wouldn’t pick up the mantle until well into his fifties.

His reason for joining the game so late? He read a philosophical piece by another philosopher—David Hume—about epistemology that made him so internally disturbed he had to spend the rest of his life seeking resolution.

Kant’s experience reminds me of the physicists Erwin Shrodinger. One day, upon accidentally stumbling across the mathematical reality of quantum gravity, he threw away his paper and decided to devote his life to biology! The mathematical discovery that the universe is somehow many places at the same time scared him enough to put it away forever.

Kant on the other hand, in feeling unresolv…