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|DOD Approximate=No

|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 (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 (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 (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 (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 (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.

A brief summary of these problems, which is needed as Kant offers an ingenious solution to the criticisms that both the empiricists and rationalists faced, is as follows. The ‘Problem of Sensations’ stems from Pyrrho’s skepticism about the reliability of our senses and whether they are adequate in providing us with the “truth”, due to the possibility that reality is not what it seems. This is important because it implies that we cannot ever make claims of truth (or lie) about the world solely based on our observations (Annas & Barnes, 1985), thus directly dismantling classical empiricism. Secondly, Hume’s ‘Problem of Induction’ stipulates that it is impossible to attain a rationally certain synthetic statement from a collection of individual observations through inductive logic, no matter how large the sample size (White, 2015) . This is because one refuting instance is enough to dismantle the whole generalisation, and that a refuting instance is always possible with a synthetic statement. Together they imply that it is impossible to make objective statements of the world through empiricism. For example, empiricists have attempted to answer the problem of induction by appealing to past occurrences, but this simply results in a circular argument. Likewise, the rationalist axiomatic system was equally unable to provide an adequate solution to these problems. Leibniz attempted to formulate a principle that aims to show the necessity of the “uniformity of nature”. Named “The Principle of Sufficient Reason”, Leibniz states that it is irrational for something to happen – and conversely, for something not to happen – without reason and establishes this as an a priori axiom that any rationalisation of nature must be contingent upon (Belot, 2001). However, Hume’s problem persists, as this axiom is still inevitably synthetic and simply cannot guarantee the certainty of inductively obtained conclusions.