It is the original source for all information/sensation given to consciousness from the outside world. Sensibility is that faculty of the mind that receives information from the senses. Rather than accept the empiricist perspective that the mind is a blank slate that passively receives and associates sense data, Kant investigates the structure of consciousness, dividing the faculties of the mind into (for starters) sensibility and understanding. The mind took center stage as the determining ground for the possibility of metaphysical knowledge and the investigation into the sources of human experience. Instead of asking how the faculties of the human mind conform to the nature of objects (as his predecessors had), Kant asks how objects must conform to the nature of the mind. Just as Copernicus revolutionized astronomy with the adoption of a heliocentric model of the solar system (thereby displacing the old geocentric model), Kant hoped to revolutionize metaphysics by displacing and reversing an age-old assumption in philosophical perspective. This summary relies on the Hackett edition of the Critique of Pure Reason as translated from the German by Werner S. The second, The Critique of Practical Reason, followed in 1788, and the third, The Critique of Judgment, in 1790. The Critique of Pure Reason is the first of three critiques.

This is part of a larger Kantian project known as transcendental idealism, a philosophy that seeks the necessary conditions for the possibility of objective reality by investigating the powers of the human mind. It is the business of the critique to set determinant boundaries to all possible knowledge through an investigation into the nature of human experience. Among other things, the Critique of Pure Reason functions as a sustained introduction to Kant’s philosophy of critical idealism, a system of ideas that seeks to determine the limits of metaphysical knowledge via a “science” of human reason.

The book critique of pure reason