Transcendental idealism

Kant’s view that objects as experienced conform to the mind’s a priori forms of intuition and categories, while things as they are in themselves remain unknowable.

A priori and a posteriori: A priori knowledge is independent of experience; a posteriori knowledge depends on experience. Kant’s account depends on principles that structure experience before any particular observation.
Sensibility: Kant’s faculty for receiving representations through affection, structured by space and time. Sensibility supplies the appearances that the mind does not create from nothing.
Noumenon: An object considered independently of the conditions under which humans experience it. Kant allows the thought of noumena while denying theoretical knowledge of them.
Immanuel Kant: An eighteenth-century German philosopher whose critical philosophy examined the limits and conditions of human knowledge. Kant formulated transcendental idealism as the central framework of his critical philosophy.
Transcendental: In Kant, transcendental inquiry concerns the conditions that make experience or knowledge possible. Transcendental idealism asks which conditions make objects of experience possible.
Understanding: Kant’s faculty for thinking objects by applying concepts and rules to representations. It synthesizes sensible representations under categories such as causality.
Phenomenon: An object as it appears under the conditions of human sensibility and understanding. Phenomena are the objects of possible knowledge, not mere private illusions.
Critique of Pure Reason: Kant’s 1781 work, revised in 1787, on the conditions, scope, and limits of theoretical knowledge. Its arguments establish the distinction between appearances and things in themselves.
Forms of intuition: Kant’s name for space and time as a priori structures through which human sensibility receives appearances. These forms explain why experienced objects necessarily appear in spatial and temporal relations.
Transcendental synthesis: The mind’s activity of combining representations into unified cognition under rules. Synthesis helps explain how manifold sensations become experience of coherent objects.

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