How did Hume prompt Kant's Copernican revolution?

Hume showed that experience can never deliver necessity — no number of observations guarantees the next case. This threatened necessary knowledge and causation. Kant said Hume woke him from his dogmatic slumber; the Copernican turn locates necessity in the mind's structure to rescue it.

Why does Paul Guyer doubt Kant's argument?

Guyer calls the Transcendental Aesthetic — the claim that space and time exist only in us, not in things in themselves — the weakest part of the book. He argues the inference can run the other way: we may simply be unable to know whether space and time are features of things in themselves.

Paul Guyer on Immanuel Kant

What Was Kant's Copernican Revolution?

Q: What was Kant's Copernican revolution?

It was Kant's proposal to reverse the relationship between mind and world: instead of our knowledge conforming to objects, objects conform to our mode of cognition. The mind supplies forms — space, time, and the categories — that make necessary, objective knowledge possible.

By John Kaag

with commentary by Paul Guyer

Immanuel Kant thought he had done for philosophy what Nicolaus Copernicus did for astronomy: reversed the direction everyone had been looking. Copernicus stopped assuming the heavens revolve around the earth and tried the opposite. Kant stopped assuming that our knowledge must conform to objects and proposed that objects conform to us. Paul Guyer, Kant's foremost English translator, explains what that reversal actually claims, why a Scottish skeptic forced Kant into it, and why Guyer thinks the crucial argument beneath it may be the weakest thing in the book.

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What Was Kant's Copernican Revolution?

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