Is Kant's Revolution in Philosophy a Copernican Turn?

Abstract

There is a widespread misunderstanding in Kant scholarship, partly due to Kant himself, as to his comparison of transcendental philosophy with Copernican revolution in its standard sense as a shift of scientific paradigms. However, there is a reason to think, that this analogy is not correct: what corresponds to it in his system of transcendental philosophy, makes a necessary and basic, but nevertheless a detail of all system, and that which can truly characterize a detail, will be incorrect in relation to the whole. The fundamental in modern Kant scholarship Allison's book«Kant’s TranscendentalIdealism» is chosen as an example of such incorrect characteristic. In my paper I prove, that acceptance of analogy of transcendental philosophy with Copernican revolution leads us to erroneous representation of the former as a kind of anthropocentrism in its phenomenalistic or subjective-idealistic form. Instead of understanding Kant’s revolution as a replacement of one kind of monismby another to what its comparison with Copernican revolution forces, I propose to understand it as a replacement of different kinds of monism, coexisted in Kant’s days in the form of «war of schools», by dualism.