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|Historical Context=Born in 18th century Europe, Kant was thrown into a time where the emergence of Newtonian science sparked a social and cultural revolution – The Enlightenment. With his revolutionary discoveries, Newton inspired the society to challenge the norm of Roman Catholicism and evoked an intellectual epiphany where people began to attempt explaining nature without consulting religion.[[CiteRef::Bristow (2011)]] As a result, two epistemological schools of thought surfaced: classical rationalism and classical empiricism. The dispute between these two views dominated the 17th century, where rationalists such as René Descartes (1596-1650) and Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) and empiricists such as John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-1776) were in a stalemate with regards to the epistemological nature of the world.[[CiteRef::Samet (2008)]] Rationalism, or apriorism, is the view that it is possible to attain knowledge independent of experience, i.e. there exists “a priori” innate knowledge that we know as part of our rational nature or through our intuition.[[CiteRef::Markie (2015)]] It holds that through the attainment of synthetic a priori knowledge outside of our sensory experience, we can deduce further theories from those axioms that will allow us to make sense of the world – that is, we are able to rationalise nature without necessarily consulting our senses. Two of its most well known proponents, Gottfried Leibniz and René Descartes, both believed that since: a) senses were unable to provide us with the ‘truth’ due to an irreconcilable level of uncertainty with our perceptions, and b) the world is intelligible and understandable, innate universal knowledge must exist.[[CiteRef::Samet (2008)]] Indeed, retrospectively we now know their respective a priori axioms were unsound, but their theories nonetheless provided more insight on the epistemological issues that both empiricism and itself shared, which will soon be explained. Empiricism, on the other hand, holds the opposite view that only our senses provide us with an accurate description of the world, and only through sensory experiences are we able to capture the objective world that we live in, make sense of each individual observation and of the world through inductive logic.[[CiteRef::Samet (2008)]] Empiricists such as Locke believed that empiricism is superior to rationalism for two distinct reasons. Firstly, Locke argued that classical rationalists often retreated to non-factual (i.e. non-empirical) claims for support: namely intuition and ‘innate’ knowledge. Secondly, empiricist arguments were preferred for their simplicity. However, despite this divide, empiricism and rationalism both suffered from the same 2 criticisms that are proposed by skeptics such as David Hume (1711-1776) and Pyrrho (360-270BC) who brought up the problems of induction and sensations respectively.

|Major Contributions=Kant, in his first Critique, responds to both these problems, along with revitalising Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason (hereafter referred to as PSR) in light of its criticism. He aimed to reconcile rationalism with empiricism by devising a system that validated our sensations as means to rationalise nature, whilst also reformulating the PSR based on his ideas of intellect being the preconditions of our experience, resolving both the aforementioned problems. Kant develops the rationalist stance by asserting that there are fundamental synthetic a priori statements that are not only independent of experience, but actually precedes sensation as a precondition that sensory experience is contingent upon. He coined a few terms, as previously mentioned, that aided the articulation of his overall case.

To address Pyrrho’s problem of sensations, Kant developed the noumena/phenomena distinction, and asserted that our senses only explained the world of phenomena rather than make objective claims about the world of noumena. Thus, Pyrrho’s problem is irrelevant because Kant simply doesn’t assert that our empirical statements refer to the objective ‘truth’. This distinction divides the world of forms (the “intelligible world”) with the world of appearances (the “sensible world”).[[CiteRef::Kant (1781)]] The former, which he calls the noumena, is the objective reality: a reality representing objects “in themselves” behind our perceptions. To Kant, the world of noumena merely puts up a façade of appearances to the senses,[[CiteRef::Kant (1781)|p. 356]] and what we perceive collectively form the world of phenomena.[[CiteRef::Kant (1781)|p. 177]] Since our perceptions pertain only to our subjective world of phenomena, Pyrrho’s skepticism regarding the certainty of synthetic statements is avoided – or rather, simply tacitly accepted by Kant, as the Kantian system now simply states that all observational statements don’t make objective claims.