The Copernican Revolution Fallacy
The Ptolemaic Relapse: Why Kant’s „Copernican Revolution“ Is an Epistemological Illusion (and the 18th-Century Matrix) In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Immanuel Kant introduced what is celebrated as the most audacious intellectual maneuver in Western philosophy: „Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects […]. 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.“ (CPR, B XVI) To make this radical inversion palatable, Kant famously compared…