Kant on dualism: Comparison with Descartes
The purpose of this study is to illustrate that Kant's Copernican revolution does not enable him to escape Cartesian dualism by comparing Kant's transcendental unity of apperception with Descartes' unity of mind. This paper thus aims at an analysis of Kant's Copernican revolution introduced in the Critique of Pure Reason in accordance with the context of manifestations of epistemology in modern philosophy. I argue that Kant's transcendental unity of apperception and Descartes' unity of mind ultimately refer to the same thing, and Kant consequently falls into a form of dualism. The dualism of Descartes is the mind/body problem. For Kant it is the division of the phenomena and the noumena. The investigation is based on an interpretation of dualism in modern philosophy as an inevitable consequence of epistemology as a way of doing philosophy.