Kant is recognized as one of the few philosophers who had an everlasting impact on epistemology by proposing his, at the time, radical idea of Transcendental Idealism which in fact rattled a great number of intellectuals during his era. Kant believed that like a clock, which its moving hands have their numbers to measure against, we humans have material objects outside of us measuring our constantly changing, ‘now’. Saying that ‘I’ exist requires a distinctive point in time, which in turn, actually requires an external reality to be present.
Kant Goes on to argue that we as humans experience sensation and understanding. Sensation is in fact intuition that we are, for example, reading a book. Whereas understanding is our ability to understand and use concepts. So without concepts, we would not be able to ascertain that our intuition was of that said book, ultimately understanding what a book is. Without intuition we would never be able to know if there are books at all.
What makes us essentially discern the external world are space and time, which are a priori aspects that are outside of ourselves. We never see the world in and of itself, the noumena, however through space and time, we get to experience it as a phenomena. There have been a myriad of ongoing refutations of Kant rejecting that space and time are indeed a priori aspects but just an extension of our a posteriori, or experience. Irrespective of the claims, we would all be fools to deny the potent contribution that Kant has added to the philosophical realm as a whole.
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