ABSTRACT
After Copernicus had shown that the earth wasn’t the centre of the universe, modern philosophy soon retaliated by treating the human mind as the centre of knowable being. It has often been remarked that Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy was the opposite of the real Copernican revolution-and indeed Kant was only completing a counter-revolution that was implicit in modem philosophy from the outset. Modern anthropocentrism-so much more deeply anthropocentric than the mere cosmological geocentrism of the Middle Agesstarts with the epistemocentrism of Descartes. ‘First philosophy’ ceases to be metaphysics and becomes epistemology. Instead of asking about the place of humankind in the world as a condition of finding out how we know the world, knowing the world is first made problematic, and then the account of such knowing is made the foundation of the account of the world and our place in it. The epistemic fallacy-the transposition of questions about what there is into questions about what we can know-gives us an anthropocentric ontology. Our means of access to reality-at first conceived after Descartes as ideas-come to be seen as all we can know of reality. Yet the reverse is the case: we can only know ideas as the reflections of reality in us. They are further from us than the reality we know through them, as the window we look through is further from us than the scene we see through it. We can focus on the window only with difficulty and usually with small profit. We do not learn what ideas are until we already know quite a bit about reality, and then we learn about them by a process of abstraction (subtraction) from the reality that we know. And what applies to ideas (originally conceived from Descartes to Kant as determinations of consciousness) applies to other windows which more recent philosophy has come to regard as opaque such as language and practice. We learn language to talk about realities that have already been revealed to us in practice. And in practice, reality hits us in the face. If practice had been taken as the starting point of our knowledge instead of thought or sensation, modern philosophy could never have arrived at idealism. But once the pattern of idealist thought had caught on-
the idea that we must first identify our means of access to reality and then conclude that we can’t go beyond that means to reality itself-this pattern was applied to practice too.
