Sunday, July 15, 2012

Space, Relativity, Copernican Revolution

With respect to the perspective of a spectator on the Earth, the circumambient universe can be characterized as 'oriented'.  Likewise, the 'space' that, for Kant, is a form of Intuition, is self-evidently oriented with respect to the subject of Intuition.  That space is 'absolute' insofar as all outer experience occurs within it, not insofar as it is unoriented, as is the case with Newtonian 'absolute space'.  While for the latter, oriented space is 'relative' space, in the Kantian system, that latter is an intellectual concept, not a form of Intuition.  Thus, one by-product of Kant's Copernican revolution is an advocacy of what Physicists call 'relativistic space'.

No comments:

Post a Comment