Kant said that Hume had awakened him from his dogmatic slumber.
Hume, and Leibniz had accepted the general view that propositions can be exhaustively divided into two classes.
On the one hand, there are truths of reason or apriori truths that were designated "analytic propositions." These types of propositions are true by definition. Examples of analytic truths include, "Triangles have three sides" and "all bachelors are unmarried males."
On the other hand, there are propositions that tell us things about the world. These propositions are aposteriori truths or truths which we know on the basis of experience.
Hume said that if this is correct, then philosophy is in a serious difficulty since it didn't put itself forward as an empirical science and since it also didn't want to say that all it was doing was analyzing tautological statements or statement which are true by definition.
Therefore, what is the task of philosophy?
Kant offered the following ingenius solution to the problem.
Kant believed that there is a category of truth which applies to the world but which is not derived from the world, as with empirical knowledge. He also believed that there actually are apriori analytic truths.
One of Kant's important distinctions which arises at this point is that which made the distinction between "things as they are" and "things as the appear to be" or "things in themselves" and "things as they appear."
Kant proposed that we can never really actually know "things as they actually are". We can only know "things as they appear." In other words, data or experience from the world must come to us in a form in which we are capable of receiving it. In this sense the apparatus which we possess for receiving this external data from the world is limited and unless information comes to us in a fashion in which it can be received and interpreted, then we have no way of actually "knowing" this information so to speak.
For example, we can receive heat waves, but we cannot receive radio waves since our apparatus is incapable of doing so. This does not mean that radio waves do not exist but only that we are incapable of receiving them. Consequently, there may be other things, which exist in the world as it actually is but we cannot actually know it from empirical observation.
With this in mind, Kant moved to the question of morality.
