This paper aims to correct some widely held misconceptions concerning Kant's role in the formation of a widespread narrative of early modern philosophy. According to this narrative, which dominated the English-speaking world throughout the twentieth century, the early modern period was characterized by the development of two rival schools: René Descartes's, Baruch Spinoza's, and G. W. Leibniz's rationalism; and John Locke's, George Berkeley's, and David Hume's empiricism. Empiricists and rationalists disagreed on whether all concepts are derived from experience and whether humans can have any substantive a priori knowledge, a priori knowledge of the physical world, or a priori metaphysical knowledge. The early modern period came to a close, so the narrative claims, once Immanuel Kant, who was neither an empiricist nor a rationalist, combined the insights of both movements in his new Critical philosophy. In so doing, Kant inaugurated the new eras of German idealism and late modern philosoph
