Murray Miles

The analytic method by which Descartes discovered the first principle of his philosophy—cogito, ergo sum—is a unique cognitive process of direct insight and nonlogical inference. It differs markedly from inductive as well as deductive procedures, but also from older models of the direct noetic apprehension of first principles, notably those of Plato and Aristotle. However, a critical examination of Descartes’s argument for the innateness of the idea of God shows that there are serious obstacles in the way of his employment of the analytic method of discovery to reach this or any other conclusion about ideas that do not fall within the scope of ordinary human experience.

Against those commentators who consider Kant’s explicit reference to Copernicus’s heliocentric reversal either grossly misleading or simply irrelevant to the revolution in philosophy carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason, it is argued in this paper that Kant’s transcendental idealist inversion of the familiar standpoint of realism and sound common sense fully justifies the talk of a ‘Copernican revolution,’ even if Kant himself never used the expression. It is not just the dominant ‘moving spectator’ motif (or transcendental turn) of the Preface that has to do with Copernicus; both the immediately following ‘crucial experiment’ motif (on the distinction between appearances and things in themselves) and the ‘critical’ motif (regarding self-knowledge and the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments) confirm the aptness of the Copernican analogy. Still, some commentators have stretched the analogy too far; the final section of the paper attempts to determine just how far it may reasonably be said to go.