During the 16th 17th centuries western epistemology was characterized by a divistion between two competing schools of thought: rationalism which favors reason or ideas, and empiricism which emphasizes sensory experience. Later, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant has achieved a transcendence of this conflict of idea, arguing that thoughts without content are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind. Kants synthetic a priori knowledge arises from an integration of rationalisms a priori knowledge and empiricisms a posteriori knowledge.
However, due to the fact that human knowledge must depend on the synthesizing mind, his knowledge is limited and cannot go beyond his experience in the actual or phenomenal world.
Keyword: a posteriori knowledge, a priori knowledge, phenomena, noumena, synthetic a priori knowledge
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