Key Ideas
Is metaphysics possible as a science at all?
Hume’s problem generalized — the whole of metaphysics consists of synthetic a priori claims.
The best way into Kant for most readers.
Lines to Remember
1 quotationsI freely admit that it was the remembrance of David Hume which, many years ago, first interrupted my dogmatic slumber.
Context & when to use it
Kant’s tribute to the sceptic who forced him to rethink everything.
When someone’s comfortable certainties have just been shaken — or to credit an opponent who made you think.
Explore Next
related by shared connections
Critique of Pure Reason
Kant’s masterwork, asking what reason can know without experience — and answering that it can know the forms of all possible experience, but nothing beyond.
Synthetic a priori
Judgments that are informative about the world yet knowable independently of experience. Kant’s master question was how they are possible.
British Empiricism
The view that all knowledge comes from experience — the mind begins as a blank slate on which the senses write.
Continental Rationalism
The seventeenth-century conviction that reason alone, unaided by the senses, can reach certain knowledge of the deepest truths.
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
The great quarrel of early modern philosophy — does knowledge come from reason or from experience? Kant tried to end it.
Vasubandhu
The 4th–5th century Buddhist philosopher who wrote the definitive summary of Abhidharma — and then, converted by his brother Asaṅga, became co-founder of Yogācāra, arguing that the world we experience is “representation only”.