Kant's Critical Turn and the Transcendental Aesthetic/Analytic

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) spent his entire life in and around Königsberg in East Prussia, where he taught at the university from 1755 until his retirement. His early or "pre-critical" period was shaped chiefly by the rationalist metaphysics of Leibniz as systematized by Christian Wolff, alongside significant work in natural science, including a nebular hypothesis for the formation of the solar system. Kant later credited his encounter with the skeptical empiricism of David Hume, particularly Hume's argument that causal necessity cannot be derived from experience or demonstrated by reason alone, with what he called, in the preface to the Prolegomena, interrupting his "dogmatic slumber" and setting him on the path toward his mature critical philosophy, inaugurated with the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, revised in a substantially reworked second edition in 1787.