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Kant's Copernican Hypothesis: An Affirmation of Transcendental Idealism as a Viable Foundation for the Sciences and Empirical Realism
Konoval, Stanley Joseph
Konoval, Stanley Joseph
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2025-05
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Philosophy
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https://doi.org/10.34944/jn7e-e571
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on questions in Kant’s philosophy of science, specifically, how we might understand it in light of his transcendental idealism, and whether it has not just historical relevance, but also continuing relevance to contemporary developments in the sciences. The dissertation takes the following form. Chapter one seeks to demonstrate that one of Kant’s primary aims in the first Critique was to respond to regional skepticism, that is, skepticism about the possibility of our acquiring knowledge of necessary truths in the specific regions of metaphysics and science. Chapter two argues that Kant advocated in the first Critique for “intellectualism,” that is, the idea that the categories provide the form, or structure, for our mind’s synthesis of our representations, and it is these same categories which ground necessity claims about the world as it appears us. Chapter three presents an interpretation of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to serve as a model for a Kantian approach to other sciences by showing that, for Kant, proper science has an empirical component, but it is grounded on the a priori metaphysical laws which derive from human understanding (i.e., the categories, the principles of understanding, and so on). Chapter four, based on the model given in chapter three, argues that Kant’s approach to science need not be limited to physics, but could also be extended in principle to other sciences as contemporarily practiced, in this case, psychology. This task is complicated by Kant’s explicit rejection of psychology as a science—but by placing Kant’s criticisms of psychology in textual and historical context, chapter four argues that Kant’s criteria for science could indeed apply to some aspects, at least, of contemporary psychology. Lastly, chapter five addresses the implications Kant’s transcendental idealism has for the sciences. It argues that Kant’s transcendental idealism is central to his philosophical system, and that the best way to reconcile his manifest empirical realism with his transcendental idealism is to recognize that, despite his empirical realism, he is best understood as also being committed to metaphysical anti-realism. Accordingly, we should adopt a two-aspects, rather than two-worlds, interpretation of transcendental idealism, because this interpretation accommodates Kant’s empirical realism and metaphysical anti-realism.
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