Editing Immanuel Kant (section)

=== Space and Time ===
Rationalists took the '''transcendentally real''' as the object of their metaphysics - they sought to pierce the veil of sense with reason and grasp God, time, the transcendental order of reality. Kant is not interested in this object, and sets it aside as the 'thing in itself.' Empiricists on the other hand waged war on Reason's dogma until they found themselves in the ashes of the '''empirically ideal''', that is, the Humean shadow realm of experience structured by nothing but repetition within its field. Kant takes this seriously, but limits it to the fleeting realm of sense-perception, of color, taste, card-tricks and rainbows. Space & Time are in the middle, empirically real but transcendentally ideal. By '''empirically real''' Kant means that within the realm of "all possible experience" space and time are real, that is to say that they are non-negotiable and constant throughout, making them valid ground for scientific judgement. But they are also '''transcendentally ideal'''; transcendental meaning that they transcend the bounds of our possible experience (do you ever experience pure or complete space or time?), are not reducible to or derived from that experience, but at the same time transcend only as limits transcend a set, they are not 'out-side' - they are ideal, that is, they are of relevance only to the operations of our mind, transcendent only as conditions of appearance, the realm to which we must limit ourselves.