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Lot 2

KANT'S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION.
KANT, IMMANUEL. 1724-1804.
Autograph Quotation Signed ("Immanuel Kant"), from an album amicorum,

1 – 10 June 2020, 13:00 EDT
Online, New York

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KANT'S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION.

KANT, IMMANUEL. 1724-1804. Autograph Quotation Signed ("Immanuel Kant"), from an album amicorum, 1 p, in Latin, Koenigsberg, 12 October, 1795.
Provenance: J.C. von Pantzer (from his liber amicorum, pencil note on verso).

"Quod petis in te est, ne te quaesiveris extra."

"That which you seek is within you; do not search for it elsewhere."

A KANTIAN MOTTO AND APT SUMMATION OF HIS PHILOSOPHY. As much as Copernicus changed our view of astronomy, and Newton our view of physics, Immanuel Kant fundamentally transformed our view of philosophy, and his influence extends today into every aspect of western thought and culture. His Critique of Pure Reason (1781) changed the paradigm of how we fundamentally view the world, impacting the social sciences, scientific inquiry, relativity and Quantum physics, and even influencing debate surrounding Artificial Intelligence in the 21st century. His revolution affirmed that the principles of reality and morals were to be discovered by studying the processes of individual thought, that objective reality was constructed by our human mind, by our senses and an a priori knowledge through cognition.

The quotation, "That which you seek is within you; do not search for it elsewhere," is actually a synthesis of Horace ("Quod petis in te est," Epistles I.11.29) and Persius ("Ne te quaesiveris extra. Satires 1.7). The leaf, from an album amicorum, is similar to the roughly nine known albums or album leaves in which Kant inscribed the thought. Echoing his direction,"'Sapere Aude! [Dare to Know!] Have the courage to use your own understanding' is the motto of the Enlightenment" (Kant, What is Enlightenment?, 1784) the present quotation may be in turn said to be his own motto, as well as a tidy leitmotif of the Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant's autograph is very rare, and especially difficult to find an example bearing directly on his philosophy and his work.


"The influence of Kant is paramount in the critical method of modern philosophy. No other thinker has been able to hold with such firmness the balance between speculative and empirical ideas. His penetrating analysis of the elements involved in synthesis, and the subjective process by which these elements are realized in the individual consciousness, demonstrated the operation of "pure reason"... His methods... dominated western philosophical thought throughout the nineteenth century, as they do today."
-Printing and the Mind of Man.

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