Kant's Copernican Revolution (review)

458 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:3 JULY 1990 Ermanno Bencivenga. Kant's Copernican Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pp. x + 26~. $32.5o. This basically sympathetic treatment of Kant's theoretical philosophy is arranged, not in the order of the first Cr/t/que, but in the author's own order of exposition. The rationale for this order is not always apparent, but quite a number of nice points are made along the way. Bencivenga begins by asking what transcendental philosophy is and, finding at first glance a number of puzzles ~in the text and commentaries, proposes to look at Kant's system as a program (akin to Hilbert's). This program is revolutionary, in the Kuhnian sense, but as with other such revolutions, the only language available for describing the revolution is that of the old, prerevolutionary conceptual framework. Bencivenga turns to this framework, and examines the rationalist view of cognition as embodied in Baumgarten's Metaphysics. There, cognition seems to be a property of the mind. But there are serious difficulties in taking cognition either as a property of the mind or as a relation between mind and object, so that not only synthetic a priori knowledge, but even empirical knowledge, is problematic. On the other hand, the empiricist notion of cognition as a relation between the mind and its own contents leads to empirical idealism and skepticism. Bencivenga considers five possibilities for saving the old conceptual framework and, finding them all inadequate, moves to the Kantian alternative. Kant's revolution is directed, not against the ordinary view of knowledge, but against that of the philosophers, according to Bencivenga: at the empirical level, the object is real, interacts with me and produces a representation of it in my mind. At the philosophical level, however, Kant explains the empirical picture by starting with representations , and "what it is to be an object will be cashed out in terms of what it is to be a representation (of a certain kind)." The Kuhnian difficulties attendant on any such conceptual revolution make it hard, not only for us, but also for Kant himself, to understand the implications of this shift, as can be seen from the difficulties in establishing just what an appearance is. Bencivenga sees appearance as what Meinong, Brentano, and Husserl called an intentional object, "intermediate between ordinary objects on the one hand and representations or states of mind on the other" (a view with which I have a great deal of sympathy). This intermediate status accounts for Kant's assimilation of appearances, in terms of the old paradigm, sometimes to ordinary objects and sometimes to representations ; the thing in itself in the old framework serves to elucidate objectivity in the new. (Aquila's intentionalist interpretation, he holds, is insufficiently post-revolutionary.) Since an essential feature of objective appearances is their connectedness to one an- ' One of these puzzles---perliaps the central one---appears to involve a confusion of levels. Bencivenga seems to hold that since for Kant thoughts without content (concepts without intuitions ) are empty, a purely conceptual transcendental Er~nntnis is no Erkenntnisat all. But though intuitions are certainly necessary at the concrete empirical level, the d/scuss/onof the empirical level takes place at the theoretical level, and employs, not intuitions, but the concept of an intuition. A similar level-confusion is responsible for the appearance of a contradiction in the Aesthetic between the last sentence before w and the tide of w (B4o)- BOOK REVIEWS 459 other, they are best thought of in systematic interconnection as a worM. Bencivenga finds five necessary features of the world of appearances, features independently defensible but recapitulated by the metaphysical deduction. This view of the Kantian program has implications for the understanding of space and time, self-knowledge, and the transcendental deduction, especially for the position that the latter serves only to "reformulate the Copernican revolution and point out its relevance to the problem [of the categories]." The principles, in turn, show how a world of appearances is to be connected, and in so doing address Hume's attacks on the unity of mind, of the object, and of objective connection (notably cause). But...