ABSTRACT
Liberating philosophy from the thrall of scholasticism began with Descartes’s turn inward, but the divisions between rationalism and empiricism clearly indicated that the scientific aspirations of the Enlightenment had not been achieved. Philosophy was in disarray, despite numerous attempts to set it right. With the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, Immanuel Kant would recast the philosophical debate in ways that reverberate to the present day. Empiricists are right to insist on the givenness of sensations, because knowledge must answer to something external and if it is to be meaningful or have content. Rationalist philosophers who make theoretical claims about these things wrongly insist that the thinking provides knowledge beyond appearances and thus engage in what Kant calls dogmatic metaphysics. Indeed, Kant’s critical philosophy did destroy a world of metaphysical speculation in which epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind set about understanding the place in the world.
