In 1781, German philosopher Immanuel Kant published the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. Kant argued that the human mind does not passively receive reality but actively shapes it through innate categories of understanding — space, time, causality. We can know the world as it appears to us (phenomena) but never the world as it is in itself (noumena). This "Copernican revolution" in philosophy reconciled rationalism and empiricism, established the limits of metaphysics, and laid the groundwork for nearly all subsequent Western philosophy, from German Idealism to analytic philosophy.
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