Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können

Without financial support after his father's death in 1746, Kant was inexorably pressed to pursue private tutoring, which he did for 7 years, and lecturing, which he did for a fee for 15 years. It would not be until 1770 when he was regularly paid as an official faculty member at University of Königsberg - he was 46 years of age at that time. Kant was such a quietly predictable German university professor that, as Heinrich Heine wrote of him, those in his town would set their watches to his daily walks. Just as calculating and precise as his walks was his comprehensive and systematic philosophy, which created a long series of varying responses by almost all subsequent thinkers in the Western tradition, and influenced in particular those in the school of Aesthetics (Shiller) and those in the school of Idealism (Schelling and Hegel). His philosophical Idealism, as some would call it later, heralded a new age in philosophy, synthesizing the two great trends of the time - Hume's empiricism and Descartes's Rationalism.