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1. Introductory
It is a commonplace by now that the expressions 'Copernican revolution' and 'the Copernican hypothesis' do not actually occur in that portion of the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (hereafter: 'the Preface') that contains the only references to Copernicus to be found in the Kantian corpus. Kant speaks rather of "der erste Gedanke des Copernicus" (KrV, B XVI) - literally, "the original idea" or "the initial thought" of Copernicus.1 Still, the word 'revolution' (German: 'Revolution', 'Umwälzung') occurs no fewer than six times within the Preface (ibid., B XI [twice], XII, XIII, XIV, XVI), though always with reference to other disciplines (mathematics and physics) and the radical innovations that set them on "der sichere Gang einer Wissenschaft" - an expression that Kant uses almost as frequently as 'revolution' (cf. ibid., B VII, XIV, XIX, XXIII, XXX).2 Even if the term 'revolution' is not explicitly applied either to Kant's own achievement in philosophy or to that of Copernicus in astronomy, Kant does speak both of "eine ganzliche Revolution" in metaphysics "nach dem Beispiele der Geometer und Naturforscher" (ibid., B XXII) and of putting forward a "Hypothese" that he himself describes as "analogisch" to that of Copernicus (ibid., B XXII, Anm.). So the philological point made with such fanfare by the commentators may be philosophically moot after all.3
The use of the expression 'Copernican revolution' to designate the radical reversal of the earth- and man-centred world-picture of antiquity and the Middle Ages is well established among historians of planetary astronomy. Small wonder, then, that Kant scholars balk at the idea of a revolution in metaphysics analogous to that of Copernicus. Given the obvious subjectivist, idealist, and anthropocentric tendencies of Kant's thought, it would seem more appropriate to speak of an anti-Copernican revolution or a Ptolemaic counter-revolution. The point has been made repeatedly, notably by Bertrand Russell.4 It has been made most recently, with exhaustive documentation of the ravages of "the anthropocentric fallacy", by the distinguished historian of science, I. Bernard Cohen.5
While the majority of those wary of the designation are so on the basis of this one disanalogy, it has by no means gone unnoticed that, as one commentator puts it, "one may say without incompatibility both that...