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How does Kant’s Copernican revolution change the relationship between the mind and objects of experience?

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Immanuel Kant German philosopher Immanuel Kant surrounded by Ouroboros, an emblematic serpent of ancient Egypt and Greece, engraving by John Chapman, published in London, 1812.

Immanuel Kant’s "Copernican revolution" in philosophy fundamentally inverted the traditional epistemological relationship between the human mind and the world. Previously, it was assumed that the mind must accommodate itself to objects to gain knowledge. Kant argued instead that objects must conform to the requirements of human sensibility and rationality.12

This shift means that the mind is not a passive recipient of external data; rather, it actively constitutes the objects of experience. Knowledge is a mixture of sensory input and a priori factors—such as the forms of space and time and the pure concepts of the understanding—that the mind imposes upon experience to make it intelligible.13

Consequently, we can only know phenomena, or things as they appear to us through these mental structures. We remain unable to know the noumenon, or the "thing-in-itself," which exists independently of our mental apparatus. By demonstrating that the subject doing the knowing helps constitute the object, Kant established that the necessary conditions for experience are rooted in the structure of the human mind itself.432