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The Palgrave Kant Handbook pp 761–789Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Kant, the Copernican Devolution, and Real Metaphysics

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism ((PHGI))

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.

Human reason has this peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.

Reason falls into this perplexity through no fault of its own. It begins from principles whose use is unavoidable in the course of experience and at the same time sufficiently warranted by it. With these principles it rises (as its nature also requires) ever higher, to more remote conditions. But since it becomes aware in this way that its business must always remain incomplete because the questions never cease, reason sees itself necessitated to take refuge in principles that overstep all possible use in experience, and yet seem so unsuspicious that even ordinary common sense agrees with them. But it thereby falls into obscurity and contradictions, from which it can indeed surmise that it must somewhere be proceeding on the ground of hidden errors; but it cannot discover them, for the principles on which it is proceeding, since they surpass the bounds of all experience, no longer recognize any touchstone of experience. The battlefield of these endless controversies is called metaphysics.

– Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Avii–viii)

The central theme of this book is: realism about structure. The world has a distinguished structure, a privileged description. For a representation to be fully successful, truth is not enough; the representation must also use the right concepts, so that its conceptual structure matches reality’s structure. There is an objectively correct way to “write the book of the world.”…

I connect structure to fundamentality. The joint-carving notions are the fundamental notions; a fact is fundamental when it is stated in joint-carving terms. A central task of metaphysics has always been to discern the ultimate or fundamental reality underlying the appearances. I think of this task as the investigation of reality’s structure.

– Theodore Sider, Writing the Book of the World ([Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], vii)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The leading figures of Analytic metaphysics include David Lewis, David Chalmers, Kit Fine, John Hawthorne, Theodore Sider, and Timothy Williamson; and some of its canonical texts are David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Sider, Writing the Book of the World; David J. Chalmers, Constructing the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Timothy Williamson Modal Logic as Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

  2. 2.

    The Copernican Devolution also has a mirror reflection in contemporary Kant-scholarship. See, e.g., Anja Jauernig, The World According to Kant: Things in Themselves and Appearances in Kant’s Critical Idealism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Anja Jauernig, Thought and Cognition According to Kant: Our Cognitive Access to Things in Themselves and Appearances in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); and Nicholas F. Stang, Kant’s Modal Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). It is tempting to give a philosophical-sociological explanation of this trend as the natural result of PhD training in departments dominated by Analytic metaphysicians, especially Princeton.

  3. 3.

    See Robert Hanna, “Back to Kant: Teaching the First Critique as Contemporary Philosophy,” APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy 8, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 2–6, http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.apaonline.org/resource/collection/808CBF9D-D8E6-44A7-AE13-41A70645A525/v08n2Teaching.pdf.

  4. 4.

    Peter Unger, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  5. 5.

    Sider, Writing the Book of the World, vii.

  6. 6.

    See Robert Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chs. 3–4.

  7. 7.

    See Robert Hanna, “Kant’s Theory of Judgment,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2013), sect. 2.1 and supplement 3, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/kant-judgment/; and Robert Hanna, “Jäsche Logic,” in The Cambridge Kant Lexicon, ed. Julian Wuerth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), http://cambridgekantlexicon.com/.

  8. 8.

    W. V. O. Quine, “Truth by Convention” (1936), in The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 77–106.

  9. 9.

    See Robert Hanna, Rationality and Logic (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

  10. 10.

    See Saul Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” in Meaning and Reference, ed. A. W. Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 162–91; and Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

  11. 11.

    See Gottlob Frege, Basic Laws of Arithmetic, trans. and ed. Montgomery Furth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964).

  12. 12.

    See Robert Hanna, “Wittgenstein and Kantianism,” in The Blackwell Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans-Johann Glock and John Hyman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2017), 682–98, sect. 3.

  13. 13.

    Robert Hanna, Cognition, Content, and the A Priori: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), esp. chs. 3, 6–8.

  14. 14.

    See, e.g., Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Science, Perception, and Reality (New York: Humanities, 1963), 127–196; Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968); and John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

  15. 15.

    See, e.g., Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference, ed. John McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982). In the contemporary debate about Conceptualism versus Non-Conceptualism, it is now standard to draw a distinction between state (or possession-theoretic) Non-Conceptualism and content Non-Conceptualism. State Non-Conceptualism says that there are mental states for which the subject of those states fails to possess concepts for the specification of those states. Content Non-Conceptualism, by contrast, says that some mental states have content that is of a different kind from that of conceptual content. In turn, essentialist content Non-Conceptualism says that the content of such states is of a categorically or essentially different kind from that of conceptual content. For a general survey of Non-Conceptualism, see José Bermúdez and Arnon Cahen, “Nonconceptual Mental Content,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2012), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/content-nonconceptual/. For the distinction between state and content Non-Conceptualism, see Richard G. Heck, Jr., “Nonconceptual Content and the ‘Space of Reasons,’” Philosophical Review 109, no. 4 (Oct. 2000): 483–523. And for the distinction between non-essentialist and essentialist content Non-Conceptualism, see Robert Hanna, “Kantian Non-Conceptualism,” Philosophical Studies 137, no. 1 (Jan. 2008): 41–64; Robert Hanna, “Beyond the Myth of the Myth of the Given: A Kantian Theory of Non-Conceptual Content,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19, no. 3 (2011): 323–98; and Hanna, Cognition, Content, and the A Priori, ch. 2.

  16. 16.

    See, e.g., Robert Hanna, “Sensibility First: From Kantian Non-Conceptualism to Kantian Non-Intellectualism,” unpublished ms. (Spring 2015), https://www.academia.edu/11942928/Sensibility_First_From_Kantian_Non-Conceptualism_to_Kantian_Non-Intellectualism_Spring_2015_version_comments_welcomed_.

  17. 17.

    See, e.g., McDowell, Mind and World; and Robert Hanna, “Kant and Nonconceptual Content,” European Journal of Philosophy 13, no. 2 (Aug. 2005): 247–90.

  18. 18.

    See, e.g., Christian Helmut Wenzel, “Spielen nach Kant die Kategorien schon bei der Wahrnehmung eine Rolle? Peter Rohs und John McDowell,” Kant Studien 96, no. 4 (Dec. 2005): 407–26; Hannah Ginsborg, “Empirical Concepts and the Content of Experience,” European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 3 (Dec. 2006): 349–72; Hannah Ginsborg, “Was Kant a Nonconceptualist?” Philosophical Studies 137, no. 1 (Jan. 2008): 65–77; John McDowell, “Avoiding the Myth of the Given,” in Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 256–72; Stephanie Grüne, Blinde Anschauung: Die Rolle von Begriffen in Kants Theorie sinnlicher Synthesis (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2009); Brady Bowman, “A Conceptualist Reply to Hanna’s Kantian Non-Conceptualism,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19, no. 3 (2011): 417–46; Thomas Land, “Kantian Conceptualism,” in Rethinking Epistemology, vol. 1, ed. Günter Abel and James Conant (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 197–239; Nathan Bauer, “A Peculiar Intuition: Kant’s Conceptualist Account of Perception,” Inquiry 55, no. 3 (June 2012): 215–37; Aaron M. Griffith, “Perception and the Categories: A Conceptualist Reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,” European Journal of Philosophy 20, no. 2 (June 2012): 193–222; Jessica Williams, “How Conceptually-Guided Are Kantian Intuitions?” History of Philosophy Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Jan. 2012): 57–78; John McDowell, “The Myth of the Mind as Detached,” in Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, ed. Joseph K. Schear (London: Routledge, 2013), 41–58; Robert B. Pippin, “What Is ‘Conceptual Activity’?” in Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World, 91–109; and Sacha Golob, “Kant on Intentionality, Magnitude, and the Unity of Perception,” European Journal of Philosophy 22, no. 4 (Dec. 2014): 505–28.

  19. 19.

    See, e.g, Hanna, “Kantian Non-Conceptualism”; Robert Hanna and Monima Chadha, “Non-Conceptualism and the Problem of Perceptual Self-Knowledge,” European Journal of Philosophy 19, no. 2 (June 2011): 184–223; Hanna, “Beyond the Myth of the Myth of the Given”; Hemmo Laiho, Perception in Kant’s Model of Experience (PhD diss., University of Turku, 2012); and Clinton Tolley, “The Non-Conceptuality of the Content of Intuitions: A New Approach,” Kantian Review 18, no. 1 (March 2013): 107–36. Weaker versions of Kantian Non-Conceptualism are defended by, for example, Lucy Allais, “Kant, Non-Conceptual Content and the Representation of Space,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47, no. 3 (July 2009): 383–413; Colin McLear, “Two Kinds of Unity in the Critique of Pure Reason,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 53, no. 1 (Jan. 2015): 79–110; Christian Onof and Dennis Schulting, “Space as Form of Intuition and as Formal Intuition: On the Note to B160 in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,” Philosophical Review 124, no. 1 (Jan. 2015): 1–58; and Peter Rohs, “Bezieht sich nach Kant die Anschauung unmittelbar auf Gegenstände?” in Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, ed. Volker Gerhardt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, and Ralph Schumacher, 5 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001), 2:214–28.

  20. 20.

    See, e.g., Colin McLear, “The Kantian (Non-)Conceptualism Debate,” Philosophy Compass 9, no. 11 (Nov. 2014): 769–90.

  21. 21.

    See, e.g., Colin McLear, “Kant on Animal Consciousness,” Philosophers’ Imprint 11, no. 15 (Nov. 2011): 1–16.

  22. 22.

    For more fully spelled out versions of this argument, see Hanna, “Kantian Non-Conceptualism”; Hanna, “Beyond the Myth of the Myth of the Given”; and Hanna, Cognition, Content, and the A Priori, ch. 3.

  23. 23.

    For more detailed discussions of these topics, see Robert Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chs. 3–5; Hanna, “Kant’s Theory of Judgment,” sections 2.2.2–2.2.3; and Robert Hanna, “Axioms,” “Synthesis,” and “Synthetic A Priori,” in Cambridge Kant Lexicon.

  24. 24.

    See Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature, ch. 3; and Hanna, Cognition, Content, and the A Priori, ch. 4

  25. 25.

    See, e.g., Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  26. 26.

    See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  27. 27.

    See Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, https://archive.org/stream/baconsnovumorgan00bacouoft#page/n3/mode/2up; Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature; Robert Hanna, “Kant, Natural Piety, and the Limits of Science,” unpublished ms. (Fall 2015), https://www.academia.edu/17038961/Kant_Natural_Piety_and_the_Limits_of_Science_Fall_2015_version_comments_welcomed_; and Robert Hanna, “Kant, Scientific Pietism, and Scientific Naturalism,” unpublished ms. (Fall 2015), https://www.academia.edu/18030039/Kant_Scientific_Pietism_and_Scientific_Naturalism_Fall_2015_version_comments_welcomed_.

  28. 28.

    See, e.g., Jennifer Schluesser, “Philosophy That Stirs the Waters,” New York Times (29 April 2013), http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/books/daniel-dennett-author-of-intuition-pumps-and-other-tools-for-thinking.html?emc=eta1&_r=0.

  29. 29.

    I am very grateful to the members of the seminar on logic, science, mind, and language at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, especially Patricia Kauark-Leite, for their extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

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  1. Independent philosopher, Co-Director, The Contemporary Kantian Philosophy Project, Boulder, USA

    Robert Hanna

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  1. Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington, USA

    Matthew C. Altman

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Hanna, R. (2017). Kant, the Copernican Devolution, and Real Metaphysics. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_33

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