The Long Way Back to Ourselves

6.2

Kant: The Turn Inward

This episode follows how you get from Hume's challenge to Kant's answer, published in 1781 as the Critique of Pure Reason after eleven years of near silence. It lays out his claim that space, time and causality are not properties of things themselves but conditions built into your own mind, the move he compared to Copernicus reversing the relationship between sun and earth. You see this claim tested against later physics, including Arthur Eddington's 1919 eclipse expedition to Príncipe that tested Einstein's prediction about bending starlight. It corrects the assumption that Kant's turn was purely abstract, showing instead how it made the observer an object you can investigate.