Critique of Pure Reason in the context of "Christian Wolff (philosopher)"

Immanuel Kant (born Emanuel Kant; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher. Born in Königsberg, he is considered one of the central thinkers of the Enlightenment. His comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and highly discussed figures in modern Western philosophy.

In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition [German: Anschauung]" that structure all experience and that the objects of experience are mere "appearances". The nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us. Nonetheless, in an attempt to counter the philosophical doctrine of skepticism, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), his best-known work. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican Revolution in his proposal to think of the objects of experience as conforming to people's spatial and temporal forms of intuition and the categories of their understanding so that they have a priori cognition of those objects.

Transcendental idealism is a philosophical system founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant's epistemological program is found throughout his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). By transcendental (a term that deserves special clarification) Kant means that his philosophical approach to knowledge transcends mere consideration of sensory evidence and requires an understanding of the mind's innate modes of processing that sensory evidence.

In the "Transcendental Aesthetic" section of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant outlines how space and time are pure forms of human intuition contributed by our own faculty of sensibility. Space and time do not have an existence "outside" of us, but are the "subjective" forms of our sensibility and hence the necessary a priori conditions under which the objects we encounter in our experience can appear to us at all. Kant describes time and space not only as "empirically real" but transcendentally ideal.

In Immanuel Kant's philosophy, a category (German: Categorie in the original or Kategorie in modern German) is a pure concept of the understanding (Verstand). A Kantian category is a characteristic of the appearance of any object in general, before it has been experienced (a priori). Following Aristotle, Kant uses the term categories to describe the "pure concepts of the understanding, which apply to objects of intuition in general a priori…" Kant further wrote about the categories: "They are concepts of an object in general, by means of which its intuition is regarded as determined with regard to one of the logical functions for judgments." The categories are the condition of the possibility of objects in general, that is, objects as such, any and all objects, not specific objects in particular. Kant enumerated twelve distinct but thematically related categories.

"Critique of the Kantian philosophy" (German: "Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie") is a criticism Arthur Schopenhauer appended to the first volume of his The World as Will and Representation (1818). He wanted to show Immanuel Kant's errors so that Kant's merits would be appreciated and his achievements furthered.

At the time he wrote his criticism, Schopenhauer was acquainted only with the second (1787) edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. When he later read the first (1781) edition, he said that many of Kant's contradictions were not evident.