"There are two kinds of philosopher. One is a person who seeks his own answers to philosophical questions. The other is someone who is an expert on the history of philosophy but does not necessarily construct his own philosophy."
"And Kant was that kind?"
"Kant was both. If he had simply been a brilliant professor and an expert on the ideas of other philosophers, he would never have carved a place for himself in the history of philosophy. But it is important to note that Kant had a solid grounding in the philosophic tradition of the past. He was familiar both with the rationalism of Descartes and Spinoza and the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume."
"I asked you not to mention Berkeley again."
"Remember that the rationalists believed that the basis for all human knowledge lay in the mind. And that the empiricists believed all knowledge of the world proceeded from the senses. Moreover, Hume had pointed out that there are clear limits regarding which conclusions we could reach through our sense perceptions."
"And who did Kant agree with?"
"He thought both views were partly right, but he thought both were partly wrong, too. The question everybody was concerned with was what we can know about the world. This philosophical project had been preoccupying all philosophers since Descartes.
"Two main possibilities were drawn up: either the world is exactly as we perceive it, or it is the way it appears to our reason."
"And what did Kant think?"
"Kant thought that both 'sensing' and 'reason' come into play in our conception of the world. But he thought the rationalists went too far in their claims as to how much reason can contribute, and he also thought the empiricists placed too much emphasis on sensory experience."
"If you don't give me an example soon, it will all be just a bunch of words."
"In his point of departure Kant agrees with Hume and the empiricists that all our knowledge of the world comes from our sensations. But--and here Kant stretches his hand out to the rationalists--in our reason there are also decisive factors that determine how we perceive the world around us. In other words, there are certain conditions in the human mind that are contributive to our conception of the world."
"You call that an example?"
"Let us rather do a little experiment. Could you bring those glasses from the table over there? Thank you. Now, put them on."
Sophie put the glasses on. Everything around her became red. The pale colors became pink and the dark colors became crimson.
"What do you see?"
"I see exactly the same as before, except that it's all red."
"That's because the glasses limit the way you perceive reality. Everything you see is part of the world around you, but how you see it is determined by the glasses you are wearing. So you cannot say the world is red even though you conceive it as being so."
"No, naturally."
"If you now took a walk in the woods, or home to Captain's Bend, you would see everything the way you normally do. But whatever you saw, it would all be red."
"As long as I didn't take the glasses off, yes."
"And that, Sophie, is precisely what Kant meant when he said that there are certain conditions governing the mind's operation which influence the way we experience the world."
"What kind of conditions?"
"Whatever we see will first and foremost be perceived as phenomena in time and space. Kant called 'time' and 'space' our two 'forms of intuition.' And he emphasized that these two 'forms' in our own mind precede every experience. In other words, we can know before we experience things that we will perceive them as phenomena in time and space. For we are not able to take off the 'glasses' of reason."
"So he thought that perceiving things in time and space was innate?"