 It can be said that the eighteenth century most certainly belonged to the likes of Hume and Voltaire, but the nineteenth would be awarded to the immensely influential philosophy of Immanuel Kant. As said best by the philosopher and historian Will Durant, it was Kant who labored best to rescue mine from matter, who argued so irrefutably, because so unintelligibly, against the uses of pure reason, and who, by the pressed digitization of his thought, brought back to life, magician-wise, the dear beliefs of the ancient faith. I believe it would be foolish and near impossible to capture the immensely complex philosophy of Immanuel Kant in just one video, so instead we will focus on aspects of his transcendental idealism, namely on the claim that the external world is unknowable and that the reality we know is only mere interpretation from our mind. Keep in mind as we continue that your interpretation may differ slightly than my own. Before getting started I would be incredibly grateful if you would subscribe to the channel. I post videos relating to Eastern and Western philosophy every week. I would like to begin with a quote from Kant himself. He said, All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason. Beneath the surface of this statement from Kant there is much to unpack. First, that there are two distinctions of knowledge that must be understood, knowledge that is a priori, and knowledge that is a posteriori. A priori, meaning in Latin from the former, refers to knowledge that can be known without experience or data from the senses. A prime example of this as said by Kant is mathematical equations, for we cannot conceive that two plus two can or ever will in this world or any other equal anything but four, because two plus two and four are one in the same expressed differently. Likewise, we cannot begin to think that the shortest distance between two points will ever be anything but a straight line. A posteriori, meaning in Latin from the latter, refers to knowledge gained through sensory experience and cannot be understood independently of reference to sensory knowledge. For example, the statement my dog is black would not be knowable without first gaining sight confirmation of his black color. This knowledge unlike a priori knowledge is subject to change upon one gaining broader evidence. Second, we move to the senses. For Kant said all knowledge begins with the senses. In order to understand Kant we must understand the terms phenomena and numina as he understood them. He believed that all objects can be categorized as one or the other. In regards to phenomena, Kant explains this term as the realities or appearances that are interpreted from our minds. In regards to numina, he explains this to be the things that exist regardless of our minds interpretations. Kant claimed that this knowledge will always be unknown because we only have the ability to know the world that is presented to us from our mind. Kant does not mean to convey that an external world outside of our mind's personal perception does not exist, but only that our mind limits reality. That phenomena and phenomena only can be known since we only know the world around us through our senses. I think an example is in order to better explain. Let us take an orange as this example. We feel the shape and texture of its rind, the cool temperature of its core, we smell the citrus entering through our nostrils, we see the bright orange color reflecting through our retinas and we taste the combination of sweetness and bitterness saturating our taste buds. When combined, these sensations have created this thing we name an orange. All of this is phenomena, what we can know. Outside of these sensations, we can conceive that this thing presumably still exists. This is numina and will always be unknowable as our sensation, Kant believed, is all that we can truly know. Anything else is only speculation. This is the limitation of the mind. He believed that speculation about numina should be avoided and said that metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck. Instead of this speculation, we should spend our hours examining our own mental abilities and how they relate to what we perceive in our own personal reality. By this self-examination, he thought we would learn more about important philosophic questions. With this view of metaphysics, I suppose Kant, as said by Durant, did not foresee that the greatest of all metaphysical tempest was to be of his own blowing. The effort to answer these problems that transcend sense experience, Kant calls his transcendental philosophy and is not so much concerned with the objects as with our a priori concepts of objects. Even so, matter of fact, a man as Schopenhauer and rabbit a heretic as Nietzsche accepted him and looked upon his reduction of the world to mere appearance as the indispensable preliminary of every possible philosophy. In future videos, I plan to expatiate on this as well as other aspects of Kant's philosophy. I attempted to explain this small part of Kant's philosophy to the best of my current ability and as said earlier in the video, the identity and credibility of this philosophy remains debated. I hope this video has helped you understand this one aspect of his incredibly complex philosophy. If you would like to learn more about Immanuel Kant, Will Durant recommended starting with Wallace's Kant and for a great criticism of the work to read Schopenhauer's World, Will and Idea. I could also recommend reading Durant's section on Kant in his book The Story of Philosophy. I will put the links to these as well as the audiobook version of this work of Durant's in the description below. I hope this video has helped you in some way. If so, don't forget to subscribe to see more on Eastern and Western philosophy. As always, thank you for talking philosophy with me. Until next time.