Neighbors in Königsberg set their watches by Immanuel Kant's afternoon walks, yet from that rigidly scheduled life he mapped the formation of galaxies and dismantled what humanity thought it knew about consciousness. This episode follows the harness maker's son through a punishing Pietist education, financial ruin after his father's stroke, an unexpected windfall tutoring Russian officers during the Seven Years' War occupation, and his early scientific work on tidal friction, the nebular hypothesis, and the Lisbon earthquake.

The hosts then explain how reading David Hume shocked Kant out of his dogmatic slumber, the decade of isolation that produced the Critique of Pure Reason, its disastrous initial reception, and the Copernican revolution in which reality conforms to the structures of the mind. They cover synthetic a priori knowledge thro ...