Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was one of the most important late figures of that broad and diverse cultural movement of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe known as the Enlightenment. The term itself connotes a process of shedding light on what was previous dark and hidden, of discovering precious truth with the help of that bright torch human reason. Despite the fundamental philosophical, religious, and political differences between such thinkers as René Descartes and John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste le Rond D’Alembert and Adam Smith, all these major representatives of the Enlightenment shared certain background beliefs and values that allow us to classify them as part of the same intellectual culture.