General Review

The central problem of classical empiricism was set by the assumption that experience really offers us nothing but separate and fleeting sense-impressions, images and feelings. For Immanuel Kant rejected the basic empiricist dogma which Hume never questioned. He did not reject it in the spirit of naïve, or refined, common sense which has sometimes, in England, seemed to be the twentieth-century alternative to classical empiricism. If philosophy too was to be set "on the sure path of a science", one requisite was that it should limit its pretensions; and a major instrument of this necessary limitation was a principle repeatedly enunciated and applied by Kant throughout the Critique . As Kant there says, he is concerned not only to curb the pretensions of dogmatic metaphysics to give us supersensible knowledge; he is concerned also to curb the pretensions of sensibility to be coextensive with the real. This seems to be the necessary, limit of sympathy with the metaphysics of transcendental idealism.

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