Kant, the copernican devolution, and real metaphysics

Robert Hanna

pp. 761-789

in: The Palgrave Kant handbook, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

Hanna argues that contemporary Analytic metaphysics exemplifies a Copernican Devolution, by returning to naive, pre-Kantian conceptions of mind, knowledge, and world. Characteristic of this contemporary philosophical regress are commitments to noumenal realism and to Conceptualism about the nature of mental representation, a heavy reliance on modal logic as providing direct insight into the ultimate structure of noumenal reality, and a dogmatic scientific naturalism usually combined with scientific essentialism. By contrast, Kant's critical metaphysics is decisively what Hanna calls a "real" (or, alternatively, "human-faced") metaphysics, and it can be illuminatingly presented in terms that specially emphasize Kant's "proto-critical" period in the early 1770s and also his "post-critical" period in the late 1780s and 1790s, both of which are somewhat neglected or undervalued, even by contemporary Kantians.

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel