Talk

Kantian contribution

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason made him one of the greatest modern philosophers. Kant was driven by Hume's thesis that metaphysics was an impossibility. First a background:

There were two school of thoughts that dominated philosophy before Kant came along:
Rationalists Rationalists like Decartes believed that all human knowledge was derived. They didnt trust the physical world and believed mathematics provided the answers. Rationalists dealt with Analystic propositions. They believed only in a priori knowledge.

Empiricists. Empiricists believed only in scientific experiments and the results there of. Empiricists believed in synthetic propositions. They believed in a posteriori knowledge.

Kant's contribution was that he believed synthetic a priori knowledge was possible. He claimed that Space and Time were a priori institutions granted to everybody. From what I can tell this helped him prove the existence of knowable things but he claimed it was impossible to claim the existence of things in themselves. For example, he claimed that if I hit a billiard ball (I know the existence of the ball from a priori knowledge) I can predict where the ball goes from synthetic propostions.