Immaneuel Kant is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the late 18th century's enlightened period. He was a German philosopher and professor famous for his three treatises: Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgement.
Kant was a German liberal who believed in democracy and metaphysics. He suggested that metaphysics can be reformed through epistemology. All the objects about which the mind can think must conform to its manner of thought.
He claims that the transcendental investigation has shown our judgments can be objective. For example, when we make one of the kinds of judgments discovered in the transcendental logic, we are making a judgment about things as objects. Kant claims that at this point, we have discerned the principle limits of the synthetic a priori. The categories of understanding and the necessary conditions of sense experience (time and space) are all the elements that are necessary for all experience. For Kant, then, there is a world independent of us, but we can only know it through our experience, and therefore only through the synthetic a priori conditions of experience. The world "in itself" is called the noumenal world. The world as experienced us is the phenomenal world. Kant means therefore to not be an idealist of the usual sort, since he asserts that there is a world independent of our ideas. Kant also means not to be either a classical empiricist nor a rationalist: he asserts all knowledge depends on experience, but also analyzes what is known prior to experience and says that these things are absolutely necessary for there to be any experience.
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