ABSTRACT
Immanuel Kant is one of the most important philosophers in the Western tradition. Kant's works touched widely on many aspects of philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. Hume started from a single but important concept in metaphysics, namely, that of cause and effect. Kant's novel contribution is the synthetic a priori proposition. In plain language there is not, and cannot be, any such thing as metaphysics at all. But Hume suffered the usual misfortune of metaphysicians, of not being understood. Metaphysics stands or falls with the solution of this problem: its very existence depends upon it. The very attempts to set up such a science are the main cause of the early appearance of skepticism, a mental attitude in which reason treats itself with such violence that it could never have arisen save from complete despair of ever satisfying our most important aspirations.
