Inductive reasoning

====Immanuel Kant====
Awakened from "dogmatic slumber" by a German translation of Hume's work, [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]] sought to explain the possibility of [[metaphysics]].  In 1781, Kant's ''[[Critique of Pure Reason]]'' introduced ''[[rationalism]]'' as a path toward knowledge distinct from ''[[empiricism]]''.  Kant sorted statements into two types.  [[analytic-synthetic distinction|Analytic]] statements are true by virtue of the [[syntax|arrangement]] of their terms and [[semantics|meanings]], thus analytic statements are [[tautology (logic)|tautologies]], merely logical truths, true by [[logical truth|necessity]]. Whereas [[analytic-synthetic distinction|synthetic]] statements hold meanings to refer to states of facts, [[contingency (philosophy)|contingencies]]. Against both rationalist philosophers like [[René Descartes|Descartes]] and [[Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz|Leibniz]] as well as against empiricist philosophers like [[John Locke|Locke]] and [[David Hume|Hume]], Kant's ''[[Critique of Pure Reason]]'' is a sustained argument that in order to have knowledge we need both a contribution of our mind (concepts) as well as a contribution of our senses (intuitions). Knowledge proper is for Kant thus restricted to what we can possibly perceive (''[[phenomena]]''), whereas objects of mere thought ("[[Thing-in-itself|things in themselves]]") are in principle unknowable due to the impossibility of ever perceiving them.

Reasoning that the mind must contain its own categories for organizing [[sense data]], making experience of objects in ''space'' and ''time ([[phenomena]])'' possible, Kant concluded that the [[Uniformitarianism|uniformity of nature]] was an ''a priori'' truth.<ref name="Salmon" />  A class of synthetic statements that was not [[contingency (philosophy)|contingent]] but true by necessity, was then [[synthetic a priori|synthetic ''a priori'']].  Kant thus saved both [[metaphysics]] and [[Newton's law of universal gravitation]]. On the basis of the argument that what goes beyond our knowledge is "nothing to us,"<ref>Cf. {{Cite book|last=Kant|first=Immanuel|title=Critique of Pure Reason|year=1787|pages=B132}}</ref> he discarded [[scientific realism]].  Kant's position that knowledge comes about by a cooperation of perception and our capacity to think ([[transcendental idealism]]) gave birth to the movement of [[German idealism]].  [[Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel|Hegel]]'s [[absolute idealism]] subsequently flourished across continental Europe and England.