From my Honors Colloquium II mid-term exam, part 2:
1. In his
key piece, Critique of Pure Reason,
Immanuel Kant posits the idea that all human knowledge falls into two
categories: a priori, meaning 'from
before', and a posteriori, meaning
'from later'. A priori knowledge is gained independently from experience, is
obvious, and requires no real effort to discern. A posteriori knowledge, on the
contrary, is gained by experience or empirical evidence. Kant then categorizes
our ability to know into two categories: noumena,
which are things that can be perceived empirically, and phenomena, which can be discerned only through intuition. 'Real'
things, or noumena, are merely representations of unknowns, or phenomena, which
are interpreted through our a priori or a posteriori knowledge to reach an
understanding, inasmuch as we can understand the universe.
