ABSTRACT
Kant is a notoriously difficult philosopher to introduce, not least because his complex prose style, even when read in his native German, presents a
formidable challenge to conventional notions of ease and understanding. What Kant lacks in fluency, however, is outweighed by his considerable strength as a uniquely subtle, idiosyncratic, and groundbreaking thinker. In this section I will show how Kant builds on the disparate philosophies of the French rationalist René Descartes and the British empiricist David Hume to present what is arguably the first great synthesis of thought in the Western tradition, uniting two opposed schools of enquiry whose origins date back to Plato and Aristotle.
