Philosophers have sought exhaustive knowledge in one of two ways: either by mastering the general nature of the universe (such as Parmenides, Plotinus, Spinoza, Hegel) or by isolating its smallest constituents (Democritus, Epicurus, Leibniz, Wittgenstein [early]). The former group are monists, the latter group pluralists.

if we presuppose that there must be something like a real world for Kant, then it is man’s creation.

Kant replaces the grace of God with its virtual opposite, the freedom of autonomous man.

There must, then, be knowledge that is both synthetic and a priori. Otherwise, science is impossible.

For this process, Hegel uses the German verb aufheben (passive participle aufgehoben), which has three meanings: “preserve,” “cancel,” and “lift up.”412

In the end, then, Kant’s knowledge (which he thought enabled him to rescue science and mathematics from skepticism) is not a knowledge of the real world. It is a knowledge of its own structure, a knowledge of the categories that it imposes on experience. It is therefore in an important sense tautological. It is the knowledge of Aristotle’s Prime Mo

Hegel is a monist, and he seeks to understand the world by understanding being in general.

the objects of thought are themselves thought. Idealism refers generally to the second alternative, views in which all reality is mind.

Kant now argues that man, not nature, is the source of the synthetic a priori truths that constitute genuine knowledge.396