The Critique of Pure Reason is one of the seminal texts of Western philosophy, and the first of Kant's three Critiques. Kant's work was stimulated by taking seriously Hume's skeptical conclusions about such basic principles as cause and effect and the implications of this skepticism for Kant's grounding in rationalism. In it he takes up Hume's argument that cause and effect cannot be experienced by the senses. Hume argued that we experience events one after the other, but not that one event is caused by the preceding event. Kant argues that synthetic, rather than analytic thinking is needed, and addresses the problem of thinking synthetically without relying on the empirical method. Kant's goal, then, was to find some way to derive cause and effect without relying on empirical knowledge. Kant rejects analytical methods for this, arguing that analytic reasoning can't tell us anything that isn't already self-evident (Bxvii). Instead, Kant argued that we would need to use synthetic reasoning. But this posed a new problem — how can one have synthetic knowledge that is not based on empirical observation — that is, how can we have synthetic a priori truths?