Reconsidering the Copernican Revolution: uniqueness and oneness of the object of knowledge in Kant

Abstract

In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of pure reason, Kant presents his “revolution in thinking” through an analogy with the Copernican treatment of the apparently irregular motion of planets in the solar system in terms of the composition of the real motion of these planets with the motion of the Earth. The use of this analogy culminated in an interpretative framework for Kantian philosophy that claims that the observable aspects of objects are functions of real aspects of both the objects themselves and the knowing subjects. This framework, summarized in the conception that the mind imposes certain aspects or properties on objects, establishes, in general, that: since there are certain conditions or means that are necessary for the apprehension or construction of objects in sensibility, and since things-as-apprehended are engendered in the very process of apprehension, the existence of these latter must be due, at least in part, to our way of knowing them. The reference to the so-called “Copernican revolution,” however, constitutes the culmination of Kantian considerations regarding how different disciplines achieved the status of science, aiming to present certain general conditions whose satisfaction would be mandatory for the transformation of any and all disciplines into science. While not necessary in themselves, but merely necessary for this purpose, they would concern the right to claim possession of knowledge, not its de facto constitution. Such conditions, or imperatives of scientificity in general, would respond to the conditions of identity of objects as objects of a scientific discipline, their adoption corresponding, one might say, to the transition from the concept of object simpliciter (characterized by the interdependence between its uniqueness, or qualitative identity, and its oneness, or numerical identity) to the concept of object of a science or, presented in the form in which it is recurrent in Kantian work, object of knowledge. In this work, we will attempt to expose some of the changes to which the formulation of the concept of object of knowledge must be subject, as well as connect them to the argumentative structure of the Critique of pure reason.