From the clarity of ideas to the validity of judgments: Kant's farewell to epistemic perfectionism.
Against the standard interpretation of Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ as the
prioritization of epistemology over ontology, I argue in this paper that his
critique of traditional metaphysics must be seen as a farewell to the
perfectionism on which early modern rationalist ontology and epistemology
are built. However, Kant does not simply replace ‘perfection’ with another
fundamental concept of normativity. More radically, Kant realizes that it is not
simply ideas but only the relation of ideas that can be subject to norms, and
thus he shifts the focus from the reality of ideas to the validity of judgments.
Section 1 of this paper clarifies the pre-Kantian role of the concept of perfection
and examines Kant’s critical response to that concept. Section 2 identifies
Kant’s point of departure from the Cartesian ‘way of ideas.’ Section 3 explains
the key problem of his novel account of epistemic normativity. I conclude that
Kant’s anti-perfectionism must be seen as the driving force behind his
‘Copernican revolution’ in order to fully appreciate his mature account of
epistemic normativity