That the question of the synthetic a Entrepreneurial Opportunities  priori judgement is an important one is made clear in the B Introduction to the Critique, where Kant wrote: ‘The real problem of pure reason is now contained in the question: How are synthetic judgements a priori possible? That metaphysics has until now remained in such a vacillating state of uncertainty and contradictions is to be ascribed solely to the cause that no one has previously thought of this  Entrepreneurial Opportunities problem….On the solution of this problem…metaphysics now stands or falls.’[1] So, this is a question that is of crucial importance to metaphysics which supposedly involves synthetic a priori cognition. This essay will first outline Kant’s argument for the synthetic a priori judgment and then, in order to assess its significance, consider it against a brief outline of the main issues in the philosophical debates of Kant’s time which he attempted to counter in the Critique. Kant was writing during the period of the Enlightenment, when there was a Entrepreneurial Opportunities  move to replace ‘the premodern acceptance of unjustified authority with the modern demand for rational justification’.[2] In keeping with the times, Kant accordingly ‘promised to supplant inherited dogmatism with a truly modern philosophy that would estab Entrepreneurial Opportunities lish and secure the limits of rational cognition and action’.[3] In the Critique Kant formulated the concept of the synthetic a priori judgment whichplayed a crucial part in fulfilling this promise. It led to a new school of thought that moved away from the view of the sources of knowledge shared by rationalism and empiricism as embodied in the work of Leibniz and Hume;[4] and in the Critique Kant showed how metaphysics was possible.[5] This is where his concept of the synthetic a priori judgement came into play. Kant acknowledges in the preface of the Critique that ‘the peculiar instability of metaphysics stands in stark contrast to the security of mathematics and natural sciences.’[6] Kant’s solution to the problem was by means of what he called his Copernican Revolution. His Copernican Revolution was about reversing the externalist conception of truth,[7] according to which, ‘truth consists in the conformity of concepts with objects, in the correspondence of our representations with things that exist independent of them’.[8] This conception of truth ‘aids scepticism because it is impossible to get outside our representations to see if they conform to an object in itself.’[9] Kant’s proposal is that objects must conform to our concepts because the structure of experience is determined by our perceptions conforming wi Entrepreneurial Opportunities th certain universal and necessary concepts which are held prior to experience.[10] Kant, in the Critique, is trying to prove that not all insights rely on sense experiences, and he is also trying to  Entrepreneurial Opportunities identify what metaphysics is and how it can be possible. Kant starts by affirming, in agreement with empiricism, that ‘all our knowledge begins with experience,’[11] but states that ‘though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of ex>