Exposition of Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” in Philosophy
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published 28/10/2007
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SummaryTaking their cue from the scientific philosophy of Francis Bacon, the thinkers of the Enlightenment assumed that the mind acted as a mirror, simply reflecting images of outward objects onto the subjective self. Immanuel Kant proposed a reorientation in which the relation between subject and object was recognized as necessarily interactive; Kant suggested that “objects must conform to our cognition (638a)” of them. Independent of experiencing objects themselves, all we are able to think about them is that which the mind itself “puts into them (638b).” The preconditions laid down by consciousness-in-general mark the limits of our rational understanding of reality. Kant’s philosophy establishes the distinction between the appearance of an object, as we experience it, and the thing itself. This distinction is framed within the greater task of the Critique of Pure Reason, of investigating whether metaphysics can be secured as a science. The end of metaphysics is to cognize what Kant calls the unconditioned. If our cognizing about a thing reaches only as far as the appearance of a thing, and not to the thing itself, then our experience cannot be of the unconditioned. If our faculty of representing things conditions the appearances that compose our experience of things, then knowledge of metaphysics- an attempt “to get beyond the boundaries of all possible experience (639b)”- is beyond the grasp of our representational minds.
Table of Contents
- The Copernican revolution in science ocurred when the motion of the stars was investigated in relation to the motion of the observer.
- An a priori judgement is one that is made independent of experience and formulates knowledge that is both universal and necessary.
- Kant's doctrine of the 'Transcendental Aesthetic' seeks to understand the means by which objects of outer sensation conform to inner sense.
- Kantian Reflections on Berkeley's Critique of Abstract Ideas
- Kant would interpret the dilemma of Berkeleyan epistemology in terms of his Copernican revolution of philosophy.
- With his conception of intuitive ideas, Kant's understanding augments Berkeley's denial of non-empirical ideas.
- The lack of such structures of thought in Berkeley's epistemology leaves him unprepared to deal with the metaphysical principles that Kant, too, seeks and ultimately deems unknowable.
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