Critique of Pure Reason

Immanuel Kant’s 1781 work, revised in 1787, examines the conditions and limits of human knowledge and whether metaphysics is possible.

A priori and a posteriori: A priori knowledge is independent of experience; a posteriori knowledge depends on experience. Kant asks how knowledge independent of experience can apply to objects we encounter.
Transcendental aesthetic: The part of Kant’s critique that examines space and time as a priori forms of human sensibility. It explains how sensory appearances are ordered before the understanding applies concepts.
Rationalism: Rationalism gives reason a central role in acquiring knowledge, often independently of sensory experience. Kant challenges rationalists’ claims to know supersensible objects through pure reason alone.
Transcendental dialectic: The part of Kant’s critique that diagnoses reason’s tendency to exceed the limits of possible experience. It explains why metaphysical reasoning generates persuasive but unresolved disputes.
Immanuel Kant: Immanuel Kant was an eighteenth-century German philosopher whose work transformed modern epistemology and metaphysics. He wrote and revised the critique as the foundation of his critical philosophy.
Analytic–synthetic distinction: The distinction separates judgments true by their concepts from judgments that add substantive information. Kant uses it to frame the possibility of judgments that are both informative and a priori.
Transcendental analytic: The part of Kant’s critique that analyzes the concepts and principles through which the understanding structures experience. It accounts for the categories and rules that make objective experience possible.
Empiricism: Empiricism holds that experience is the primary source or test of human knowledge. Kant accepts experience’s necessity but argues that a priori structures also shape it.
Paralogisms of pure reason: Kant’s critique of arguments that infer a simple, enduring soul from the formal unity of self-consciousness. It challenges rational psychology’s attempt to know the soul as an object.
Inaugural Dissertation: Kant’s 1770 dissertation distinguishes the sensible and intelligible worlds and anticipates themes of his later philosophy. It shows an earlier account of sensibility that the critique substantially reworks.

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