Kant's Copernican Revolution as an Object of Philosophical Retrospection
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5840/eps201956477Keywords:
ontology, metaphysics, transcendental method, history of thought, Kant’s Copernican revolution, idealism, realism, skepticismAbstract
The article deals with Kant's Copernican Revolution as an object of philosophical retrospection. It is suggested that Kant's Copernican Revolution can be understood in terms of the conditions of its possibility within the framework of a regressive transcendental argument. The regressive transcendental argument is equated with the universal philosophical method, which is circular in nature: starting with the facts of experience, it concludes about the necessary conditions for the possibility of a given experience and compares these conditions of possibility with what is given in experience.
It is shown that in the framework of such an approach, falsification of the initial premises of the Kantian project becomes inevitable. It is shown that the character of this falsification is essentially dialectical. By falsifying the transcendental project of the “Copernican revolution” as a whole, we question the “once and for all” boundary drawn by Kant between the epistemological premises (“idealism”) and ontological foundations (“realism”).
