ABSTRACT
Kant’s Copernican method was to have negative and positive consequences for metaphysics. The negative consequences seem obvious. Metaphysics had been conceived as the rational inquiry about “things in themselves”, using the faculty of inferential reasoning alone, and the “critique of pure reason” had undermined the idea of such inquiry-it tells us what we cannot know. We cannot know things in themselves, we can only know things in relation to our own knowing faculties, i.e., “appearances”. The paralogisms and antinomies bear witness to the limits of the human intellect when it attempts to stretch its reasoning beyond the regions of sensibility. In this respect Kant’s philosophy often appears as a form of scepticism-as it is sometimes put, a “transcendental” form of scepticism-the position of weak TI. However, Kant conceived of his project as having a positive aspect
as well:
when we become aware that the principles with which speculative reason ventures beyond its boundaries do not in fact result in extending our use of reason, but rather … inevitably result in narrowing it by threatening to extend the boundaries of sensibility, to which these principles really belong, beyond everything, and so even to dislodge the use of pure (practical) reason.
