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How do space and time shape human experience in Kant’s philosophy?

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Immanuel Kant German philosopher Immanuel Kant surrounded by Ouroboros, an emblematic serpent of ancient Egypt and Greece, engraving by John Chapman, published in London, 1812.

In Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, space and time are not external realities that exist independently of the human mind. Instead, they are a priori "forms of sensibility" or "intuitions" that the mind imposes upon the data of experience.123

These forms function as the necessary framework through which human beings perceive the world. According to Kant’s transcendental idealism, we can only experience objects as phenomena—things as they appear to us—because our sensory apparatus "clothes" all incoming data in the structures of space and time.134

Because these forms are inherent to the human subject rather than the objects themselves, we can never know things-in-themselves (noumena), which exist outside of space and time. This "Copernican revolution" in philosophy suggests that the world conforms to the requirements of human sensibility, rather than the mind passively conforming to an external world. Consequently, our scientific knowledge is limited to the realm of phenomena, as space and time are the essential conditions that make any coherent experience possible.1324