structural:scholar_edition
Kant

In the eighteenth century the German philosopher Immanuel Kant published his theory of space as "a property of our mind" by which "we represent to ourselves objects as outside us, and all as in space" in the Critique of Pure Reason On his view the nature of spatial predicates are "relations that only attach to the form of intuition alone, and thus to the subjective constitution of our mind, without which these predicates could not be attached to anything at all." This develops his theory of knowledge in which knowledge about space itself can be both a priori and synthetic. According to Kant, knowledge about space is synthetic because any proposition about space cannot be true merely in virtue of the meaning of the terms contained in the proposition. In the counter-example, the proposition "all unmarried men are bachelors" is true by virtue of each term's meaning. Further, space is a priori because it is the form of our receptive abilities to receive information about the external world. For example, someone without sight can still perceive spatial attributes via touch, hearing, and smell. Knowledge of space itself is a priori because it belongs to the subjective constitution of our mind as the form or manner of our intuition of external objects.