A revolution marks a fundamental movement in time that is so dramatic and wide-reaching that it is accepted by all people and all ideas revolve around it. Immanuel Kant was the nexus of modern philosophy that brought together the rationalist’s and the empiricist’s ideas into creating his own revolution. With the rationalists placing heavy emphasis on metaphysics and a priori knowledge and the empiricists believing in experimental or a posteriori knowledge, Kant sought out to break these significant ideas down even further in order to bring them together into what he thought represented the “Copernican revolution.” Nicolaus Copernicus was an astronomer and mathematician during the Renaissance. He formulated the idea that the universe actually placed the Sun at the center of the universe rather than the much accepted notion at the time of the Earth being at the center. This was considered a major event the history of science and the Scientific Revolution. Like Copernicus, Kant reversed the roles of the accepted concept of time and space in an epistemological sense. He believed that the mind was the center of the objective world, the mind being analogous to the sun in Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism …show more content…
Kant sees the world in a transcendental view where instead of understanding objects in themselves, we look at the phenomena (objects) presented to us (subjects). In other words we are not actually seeing things as they are but rather as they appear to us. Before Kant, the rationalists believed that the external world was implanted in us when we are born and was an innate idea. The empiricists believed that the external world was only understood through our sense experiences. Kant seeks to resolves this issue by stating that the existence of the external world is required for us to have sense perception, hence the mind being at the