Immanuel Kant had an enduring conviction in the primacy of practice over theory—the ultimate aim of philosophical inquiry should be to help people live well.
…The best-known biographical factoids about Kant are that he never left his hometown of Königsberg, never married, and took his walks with such regularity that the housewives of the town would set their clocks by them. These chestnuts are enough to cast Kant as a rarefied intellectual divorced from worldly pleasures and concerns, buttressing his reputation as a cold, arid system builder.
Nothing could be further from the truth. For much of his life, as Willaschek writes, Kant was a fashionably dressed "dazzling socialite," an enthusiastic player of billiards and cards with a sharp, dry wit. When he turned 40, he became more focused on his work, perhaps prompted by the death of his friend Johann Daniel Funk. He began rising at 5 a.m. every day and trimmed his social calendar. Even then, he had two to five guests for protracted daily lunches, where philosophy was the only subject to be verboten.
Kant's interests were also anything but parochial. He lectured and wrote on topics ranging from intellectual copyright to physical geography, the origins of mankind to volcanoes on the moon. What's more, his philosophical concerns were never purely abstract. Many of Kant's writings were on practical matters…
Julian Baggini in The Wall Street Journal: https://apple.news/AWoXTxWffQW2jMsMVwfVbXg
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