Say you want a revolution, for example...

Kant's Copernican Revolution is usually lesson number one for people studying Kant. I went over it in my class about Kant last semester, and I refreshed myself with Robert E. on Monday. I'm about to go over it again with Professor Bykova's class.

The Copernican Revolution was the realization that the world revolves around the sun and the sun does not revolve around the earth.

The Kantian Copernican Revolution is that the world must conform to minds and that minds do not conform to the outside world.

Slower, and with more volume: the experience of the world must conform to the experience of the mind, and in that order; according to Professor Kant, the loveable namesake of this blog.


Listen to Immanuel Kant himself write it, "Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition [italics mine],

I'm stopping to give you television addicts time to take it in. Basically he just wrote what I wrote up top. (Or did I write what he wrote? whatever.)

Quote continued:
"which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, whcih is to establish something about objects before they are given to us.

This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revovle and left the stars at rest. Now in metaphysics we can try in a similar way regarding the intuition of objects. If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well represent this possibility to myself." [Certainly from the Preface B, numbered Bxvii, from Guyer and Wood].


There's an important and I think rather boring definitional note here: “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B76) (help from the SEP)

Basically, intuitions are what is given to us. They are Experience with the capital e. If you see flying ghosts and walruses, that's your trip, man. But usually instead of swirls of colors and shapes we get the reality we all know and love.

So for Kant, intuition is what is given. This could be completely wrong, so this post will be subject hopefully to some kind of revision.

The other dear and clear thing to Kant's heart are concepts. Concepts are how we regulate what is given as intuition.

More work on this later....