Sunday, July 8, 2012

Gravity and Copernican Revolution

Perhaps the best textual support for the standard interpretation of Kant's 'Copernican revolution'--that he effects a transition that is analogous to Copernicus' transition from Geocentrism to Heliocentrism--is in a footnote to B xxii of the 1st Critique.  There, Kant cites the influence of Copernicus' insights on Newton's theory of Gravitation, regarding the attraction that "holds the universe together", which would seem to directly apply to the orbiting of the Earth around the Sun, i. e. to Heliocentrism.  However, in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, written by Kant before the B edition of the 1st Critique, the fundamental type of circular motion is presented as that of a body spinning on its axis, with respect to which the orbiting of one body around another, including examples of the latter taken from Newton's works, are special cases.  Hence, the passage at B xxii does not effectively challenge the hypothesis previously proposed here--that the Copernican transition, from Geocentrism, that primarily inspires Kant is that to the Earth spinning on its own axis, not that to the Earth orbiting the Sun.

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