-ˌnizəm noun
( -s )
Usage: usually capitalized
: the philosophy of Immanuel Kant that endeavors to synthesize the tradition of continental rationalism and British empiricism by holding that phenomenal knowledge is the joint product of percepts given to us through sensations organized under the forms of intuition of space and time and of concepts or categories of the understanding but that reason involves itself in fallacies if it tries to apply to the noumenal the principles of the understanding applicable only to the phenomenal so that the speculative ideas of God, the world, and the self although having heuristic import represent regulative knowledge as distinguished from the constitutive knowledge about the phenomenal at the same time that the ideas of God, freedom, and immortality represent necessary presuppositions for morality — compare categorical imperative , noumenon , phenomenon