Kants Copernican Revolution
... analysis of how the mind perceives its surroundings in the Critique of pure Reason was as ambitious an undertaking as Copernicus Heliocentric universe. Modern man’s perception of reality naturally takes into account Kant’s notion that the mind alters our perception of the world around us. This idea was not accepted in the sphere of philosophy during Kant’s era of thought. Pre-Kant civilization had no reason to question how it perceived its surroundings. It was thought that the world was like a mirror and humanity merely took in the world around them at face value. It was Kant’s revolutionary insight to the mind’s perception of reality that lead to what is referred to as a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy. Kant’s mission in writing the Critique of Pure Reason was to test the facilities of knowledge in order to determine the limitations of knowledge. He wanted to challenge the tradition of how man judged his surroundings. He did this by using the only tool available to him to analyze the mind; the mind. Kant recognizes this double standard in his experiment but continues knowing that he is presented no alternative option. Benjamin Hollberg Philosophy 303 April 17, 2003 Kant’s problem with knowledge was how to connect the subject of experience and the predicate of truth. He started by pointing out the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. He defined analytic judgment as one in which the predicate is contained in the subject, just as triangles have three sides. A synthetic judgment is one in which the predicate adds to the subject. Kant also distinguished two ways that judgments can be recognized. If the judgment is based on testable experience it is a posteriori all that is not based on experience is a priori. Kant’s need to explain the existence of synthetic a priori lead him to believe that experience creates the content and the mind provides the structure that determines the way that the subject will be organized and understood Kant’s argument is that the mind through its instinctive need for understanding categorizes our experiences into twelve constructs. We categorize every awareness of the five senses into one of these categories. He separates these into four groups: quantity, quality, relation, and modality, with subgroups being space, time, causality, and substance. These twelve categories form the line between what we can and cannot know. But this idea brings into consideration another important question, “what is the status of that which lies outside the boundary of possible emp...