~ 1781 ~
Immanuel Kant's book "Critique of Pure Reason" is a systematic analysis of the limits and scope of metaphysics that seeks to determine the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics. Kant explores the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge, and between analytic and synthetic judgments. He proposes a new basis for a science of metaphysics that abandons the quest to know the world as it is in itself independent of sense experience. Instead, his critical philosophy takes into account the role of people's cognitive faculties in structuring the known and knowable world. "Critique of Pure Reason" has influenced Western philosophy and inaugurated modern philosophy.