Kant broke his own brain so you don't have to

By the 1700s, philosophy had split into two camps and both of them were losing their minds. On one side, you had the rationalists - Descartes, Leibniz, the gang - convinced that pure logic alone could tell you everything about reality. God, the soul, the structure of the universe. Just sit in a chair and think hard enough and truth will show up. On the other side, Hume and the empiricists were saying the opposite: everything comes from experience. If you can't see it, touch it, or stub your toe on it, you don't actually know it. Hume pushed this so far he started doubting causality itself - like, maybe things don't actually cause other things, maybe we just see them happen together a lot and assume. Kant read Hume and, by his own account, it woke him from his "dogmatic slumber." Then he spent the next decade building a 800-page philosophical missile aimed at everyone.