payment page
Kant’s three major volumes are entitled critiques, and his entire philosophy focuses on applying his critical method to philosophical problems. The correct method in philosophy, according to Kant, is not to speculate on the nature of the world around us but to perform a critique of our mental faculties, investigating what we can know, defining the limits of knowledge, and determining how the mental processes by which we make sense of the world affect what we know.
This change in method represents what Kant calls a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Just as Copernicus turned astronomy on its head in the sixteenth century by arguing that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the solar system, Kant turns philosophy on its head by arguing that we will find the answers to our philosophical problems in an examination of our mental faculties rather than in metaphysical speculation about the universe around us. One part of this revolution is the suggestion that the mind is not a passive receptor but that it actively shapes our perception of reality. Another is a general shift, which remains to this day, from metaphysics toward epistemology. That is, the question of what reality actually consists of has become less central than the question of what we can know about reality and how we can know it.
