“Before Kant, an inquiry into “the nature and origin of knowledge” had been a search for privileged inner representations. With Kant, it became a search for the rules which the mind had set up for itself (the “Principles of the Pure Understanding”). This is one of the reasons why Kant was thought to have led us from nature to freedom. Instead of seeing ourselves as quasi-Newtonian machines, hoping to be compelled by the right inner entities and thus to function according to nature’s design for us, Kant let us see ourselves as deciding (noumenally, and hence unconsciously) what nature was to be allowed to be like. Kant did not, however, free us from Locke’s confusion between justification and causal explanation, the basic confusion contained in the idea of a “theory of knowledge.””

– Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

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