Transcendental Idealism in the Third Critique

Kant’s assertions about things in themselves in the Critique of Pure Reason are notoriously difficult to understand and indeed to reconcile with one another. The fundamental claim of transcendental idealism is that our experience and knowledge are necessarily shaped by the forms of our intuition (space and time) and ordered by the pure concepts of the understanding (categories). This claim naturally leads to its contrast with philosophical views that assume that we have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. For such viewpoints, true knowledge is knowledge of how things are quite independently of our minds.