The two primary schools of thought regarding epistemology and our relation to the world are rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism is the position that our mental faculties take precedence over our experience, especially in determining truth. Empiricism takes the opposite approach, our experiences and stimuli are the basis of knowledge, and reason is a slave to our will. I believe that most people will accept a synthesis of this, and say that it takes both to understand the world. David Hume argued so effectively for empiricism that he made the grounds of rationalism and science baseless. Fortunately, Immanuel Kant brought the two ideas together with his theory of transcendental idealism.
David Hume did terrific work in pointing out philosophical
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Fortunately, Immanuel Kant takes on the challenge of refuting Hume, but what makes Kant different is that he is not resorting to philosophical excesses like his predecessors. He instead develops a framework that deals with the fundamental basis of reason, which contains a priori truths, or truths before we perceive. To understand how Kant reached this conclusion, it must be understood that he already believed that we had reached universal truths (causation for example) via science and common sense. So he does not do what previous epistemological philosophers have, by trying to understand how humans acquire knowledge and then compare that to science to see if it is verifiable, but does the exact opposite. He develops a framework under the assumption that we already have verifiable knowledge through science and he looks to see how we acquired it. This radical departure is Kant's Copernican revolution, and all subsequent theories will be described as either pre-Kantian or post-Kantian. Kant's theory at first seems counter intuitive and requires an explanation much more strenuous than before, but becomes widely accepted, much like Copernicus' heliocentric