 Many interpreters have thought that in the Critique of Pure Reason, and particularly in its first section, the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant attempts to engage the Leibnizian “relationalist” and the Newtonian “absolutist” conceptions of space with transcendental  idealism.[1]  As Charles Parsons puts it, “the issue between what are now called absolutist and relationalist conceptions of space and time, represented paradigmatically by Newton and Leibniz” represents “the background to all of [Kant’s] thinking” about space and time (Parsons 1992, 67; cf. Torretti 1999, 105). In the beginning of the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant frames his view by contrasting it with the failures of the Leibnizians and the Newtonians to conceive of space appropriately: