When did Kant become a professor?

W: Immanuel Kant was born in the east of Prussia in 1724. His parents hoped he would study theology; however his interest was towards the classics and he was recognized as one of the most promising classical scholars at college. In 1740, Kant entered the University of Konigsberg and studied primarily with the philosophy faculty. His father died in 1746 and for the next nine years, Kant earned his living as a private tutor. In 1756, he gained professorship and supplemented his income by working as an assistant librarian and through lecturing. Around this time, he introduced a series of popular lectures on physical geography. That regularly attracted audiences about fifty freshmen. Although Kant was a philosopher, he had a great impact on geography by helping to secure its places among university disciplines. He also played an important role in freeing geography from its previous close relationship with theology. Kant proposed that human knowledge could be organized in three ways, by classifying facts according to the type of objects studied, by exampling the temporal dimension and looking at things in terms of their history and by understanding facts relative to spatial relationships. This last represents the field of knowledge commonly known as geography. He taught geography for thirty years and began each term by clarifying the position of geography among the many fields of learning. He believed that geography represented the differentiation of places and that was fundamental to Kant’s understanding of the world. He also saw a clear distinction between the fields of history and geography. In contrast to his numerous philosophical writings, little is left of Kant’s geographical writings. Most of what we know was based on his lectures. Kant believed that the human element was an entangled part of geography. He claimed that physical geography was a summary of nature and the basis of history and all the other possible geographies.