![Immanuel_Kant_%28painted_portrait%29[1]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3555/3428605485_338fd7476d_m.jpg "Immanuel_Kant_%28painted_portrait%29[1]")
‘a priori’
I love this term! Is this a philosophical explanation of karma? Does your past decide your future? Is your future nothing but your past?
A little excerpt taken from Wikipedia.
Eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant states, “although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience”. According to Kant, a priori knowledge is transcendental, or based on the form of all possible experience, while a posteriori knowledge is empirical, based on the content of experience.
Kant states, “… it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion).”
Thus, unlike the empiricists, Kant thinks that a priori knowledge is independent of the content of experience; moreover, unlike the rationalists, Kant thinks that a priori knowledge, in its pure form, that is without the admixture of any empirical content, is knowledge limited to the deduction of the conditions of possible experience.
