German philosophy
Neo-Kantianism refers broadly to the revival of the type of philosophy explained by Immanuel Kant and of the interpretations of Kant provided by post-Kantian philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Jakob Friedrich Fries and Johann Friedrich Herbart. Major figures in the neo-Kantian movement, which began around the 1860s, include Friedrich Albert Lange and Hermann Cohen.
German philosophy
In 1781, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) published his "Critique of Pure Reason", in which he attempted to determine what we can and cannot know through the use of reason independent of all experience. Briefly, he came to the conclusion that we could come to know an external world through experience, but that what we could know about it was limited by the limited terms in which the mind can think: if we can only comprehend things in terms of cause and effect, then we can only know causes and effects. It follows from this that we can know the form of all possible experience independent of all experience, but nothing else, but we can never know the world from the “standpoint of nowhere” and therefore we can never know the world in its entirety, neither via reason nor experience.