David asked:

The way I understand Kant's transcendental foundations to epistemology is that he divided up
existence into different 'worlds' — the phenomenal world, the world-in-itself, and the world or structure
of language. Are there any other philosophers since Kant and completely independent of him who
have started from scratch like this but divided things up in a truly different way?

If not, who are the philosophers that have taken this same starting point but proposed different
relationships between these worlds?

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I'm a bit puzzled by the way you've phrased your question. If you really understood that Kant "divided"
the world, then you've misunderstood (consolation prize: you're not alone). There is only one world,
but this one world is not accessible to us in its totality. The phenomenal world is the same world as
the one which contains the Ding-an-sich (Thing-in-itself), but the latter is not knowable to us for
various reasons, e.g. we lack the sensory (including scientific) apparatus to detect it. To put this issue
into a nutshell, you could say that the divisions in Kant's "worlds" are aspects,and one relatively
straightforward way of understanding this is by an everyday example such as what you can see of a
boat. First, the side not facing you, second that portion of it on the inside and third, the portion
submerged in the water — these are all aspects which you can inspect one at a time, but never all at
once. Kant's idea is that the world, both the material and the noumenal, has aspects that elude our
apprehension altogether. The only aspect to which we have directaccess is the phenomenal. — The
philosophers in the second part of your question are Descartes (Discourse on Method) and Popper
(The Self and its Brain,cowritten with John Eccles).

Jurgen Lawrenz

Sydney