"Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, declared himself to be a “transcendental idealist and an empirical realist.” Any proper reading of Kant must come to terms with what he means by this, and indeed this phrase has given rise to an immense scholarly literature.

The gist of what he means is that from a “transcendental” perspective—- a perspective that is oriented around the question of the condition of possibility of experience and knowledge—- the things we experience and know are mind-dependent, but that this very “mind-dependence” does not argue against the objective validity of our knowledge, but speaks for it: what the subjective conditions of knowledge and experience explain is the very possibility of objective knowledge and experience.

So basically: the things we experience really exist, and yet the very fact that they exist can only be understood rigorously if we regard them not as noumenal, not as things in themselves —-existing completely independent of the subject—-, but as phenomenal, as things existing for us, in relation to us.

To give a paradoxical spin to it: in themselves they only exist for us, but for us they exist in themselves''.

Curtis Adler