ABSTRACT
It is well known that the effect which a reading of Hume had upon Kant was to awaken him from his ‘dogmatic slumber’. As a result, he set out to provide a ‘critical philosophy’ which would in effect constitute something of a reconciliation between Rationalism and Empiricism. Kant took over, lock, stock and barrel, the representative theory of perception, and maintained that all knowledge is founded on subjective experiences produced by entities outside the mind. The idealist movement in philosophy, which became such a force in the 19th century, began in effect when Fichte rejected the Kantian things-in-themselves. The basic form of experience is, in Hegelian terms, an apprehension of the immediate. The precedents for the Hegelian doctrine that there can be no immediate knowledge of particulars is the Aristotelian view that knowledge is of the universal and the Kantian view that knowledge is ultimately a question of fitting something under a concept in judgment.
