Judgment Sorter
Analytic or synthetic? A priori or a posteriori? Sort Kant's famous examples.
a priori / a posteriori
A priori knowledge is independent of all experience (e.g. mathematics); a posteriori knowledge derives from experience.
The distinction is the foundation of the “Critique of Pure Reason”. Kant's guiding question: how are synthetic judgments a priori possible — judgments that extend our knowledge and yet hold necessarily, such as “7 + 5 = 12” or “everything that happens has a cause”?
His answer: such judgments are possible because they concern the forms that our own cognitive faculty imposes on all experience — space, time and the categories.
Try it yourself
Flashcards
Review the concept with the Leitner flashcards — what you know comes back less often.
Where it appears
- Aesthetics
- Knowledge — The Copernican revolution
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals — Origins & context
- Critique of Pure Reason
- FAQ
- Hope — Freedom, immortality, God: the three postulates
- Teaching — 4 · Theory of knowledge: rationalism, empiricism, Kant's turn