Christian Philosophers and the Copernican Revolution

This chapter suggests that Christian philosophers should be favorably disposed toward Kantian idealism, that there are important affinities between Kantian idealism and Christian theism—important resources in the former for expressing themes essential to the latter. After discussing four kinds of Kantian idealism, it turns briefly to three versions that differ in important ways from Kant's own. All of them reflect the fact that the history of the Copernican Revolution, in spite of the universalist character Kant gave to it, has been, from at least the time of Hegel on, particularist and pluralist. For Kant, the forms and categories that constitute the phenomenal world are at work in all. Human cognition works at all times and in all places. But almost immediately people began to notice the operation of historically specific a priories constituting a variety of human worlds.

Character (mathematics) · Epistemology · Hegelianism · Idealism · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Philosophy