Kant's Table of Judgments of Reason and the Categories of Understanding
The Critique of Pure Reason (German: Kritik der reinen Vernunft) by Immanuel Kant, first published in 1781, second edition 1787, attempts to resolve the conflict between rationalism and empiricism by proposing a new angle of approach, viz. phenomenalism. Kant called his middle way a Copernican Revolution in epistemology since, contrary to the traditional approaches, Kant's theory proposes that it is not the mind that conforms to reality (that is sees things as they are), but it is reality that conforms to the a priori forms and categories of our understanding. Thus, we only see things as they appear (phenomena) not as they are. Kant borrowed the term "categories" from Aristotle, but with the concession that Aristotle's own categorizations were faulty. He thought that Aristotle had no guiding principle for the discovery of the categories and so randomly picked them up; consequently, his table remained imperfect. The imperfection is apparent from his inclusion of &quo