Kant's Copernician Turn : Reading the Analytic in Light of the B-Preface (S. Bird-Pollan)

Conférence | Talk

Stefan Bird-Pollan

(University of Kentucky)

Kant's Copernician Turn : Reading the Analytic in Light of the B-Preface

Source : Wikipedia

In this paper I suggest that Kant’s project is properly understood as departing from the ‘fact’ of experience, that is, from the particular way the world impresses itself upon us. Against both empiricism and rationalism which seek to free us from the contingencies experience or nature by classifying nature once and for all, Kant’s project begins by acknowledging our fundamental situatedness in experience and argues that nature can only be made intelligible from within our interaction with it. Such intelligibility is of a different kind than the intelligibility envisioned either by rationalists or empiricists. Kant’s Copernican turn employs the metaphor of science’s inquiry into nature as a way of understanding human subjectivity’s continued need to respond or make sense of nature from within nature. For Kant this continued involvement with nature is what makes us human. In the second part of my paper I read what Kant says in the Analytic if the first Critique in light of this central claim about our necessarily ongoing interaction with nature.

Friday, September 30th, 2016

3:00pm

University of Ottawa

Desmarais Hall

Room 8161