Martin Knutzen was born in Königsberg in 1713 and, like Kant, lived there his entire life, attending first a traditional elementary school (though not the Collegium Fridericianum, as Kant did) and then the university, from which he graduated in 1734. Supported by Friedrich Albert Schultz, who was one of his professors and a leading Pietist at the university, he was offered and accepted the extraordinary professorship of logic and metaphysics at the early age of twenty-one. Over the next seventeen years Knutzen forged a distinctive synthesis of religious Pietism, Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics, and Lockean epistemology, while lecturing and publishing with considerable popularity on a wide range of topics in logic, philosophy, and mathematics. Historical evidence suggests that Kant attended his lectures and even received personal attention from him outside of class. Knutzen's death in 1751, at the age of thirty-eight, cut short a fairly distinguished, even if not exceptional, academic career.

Despite his early death, Knutzen established himself as the best and most influential philosopher in Königsberg in the 1730s and 1740s by publishing a number of substantive works in natural theology, logic, astronomy, and metaphysics. In 1740 he published an extremely popular work in natural theology, Philosophischer Beweis von der Wahrheit der christlichen Religion (Philosophical Proof of the Truth of the Christian Religion), a work that was directed primarily against English deists and went through five editions before 1763.