Van Cleve, James - Problems from Kant

"The most important and difficult function of philosophy," wrote Sir William Hamilton, is "to determine the shares to which the knowing subject and the object known may pretend in the total act of cognition." This question looms as the great snowy mountain referred to above: how much of the world owes its existence its character to the activity of human (or other) minds, and how much would be just as it is even in the absence of minds? On this question, philosophies run the gamut from pure idealisms that ascribe everything to the knowing subject to pure realisms that ascribe everything to the object known.