the attempt at understanding the nature of reality. Yet Hume, on Kant’s account, takes too negative a view of the possibility of metaphysics, i.e. Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz’s attempt to characterize substance is the archetypal example of this. In particular, he was convinced that many previous philosophers were involved in projects to answer questions or define concepts which simply did not yield themselves to philosophical inquiry. Kant’s main influence was undoubtedly David Hume, whose philosophical project was – in a similar way to Kant’s – extremely critical of the metaphysics which came before him. Kant and Hume Portrait of David Hume as a young man, Allan Ramsey, 1754, National Portrait Gallery of Scotland. He engaged with all of his predecessors to some extent, and saw fixing many of their mistakes as fundamentally enmeshed in the success of his own project. Kant was, in many ways, not just the end of but the culmination to this ‘Early Modern’ tradition in philosophy. Richard Rorty, a famous self-conceived iconoclast, was attempting to structure a course which followed an alternative history of philosophy, one which left out all of the major figures whilst nonetheless telling a coherent narrative, and complained to a colleague that he couldn’t find a way to leave Kant out.
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