Sunday, October 8, 2017

Geocentrism, Anthropocentrism, Anthropomorphism

While Kant conceives his Copernican Revolution as an instructive analogy, it actually involves a more fundamental discovery.  The analogy is between the Sun-Earth relation and the Mind-Object relation, concerning an inversion in each relation of which term is oriented to the other.  But, as the Medieval appropriation of the Ptolemaic system reveals, Geocentrism is really Anthropocentrism.  So, what Kant's Epistemological inversion shows is that that Anthropocentrism is actually Anthropomorphism, i. e. that For-Us is an Epistemological, not an Ontological, relation.  In other words, in Kant's Copernican Revolution, an apparent analogy between two pairs of terms is actually a replacement of one by the other.

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