Leuven Kant Conference 2025: Kant's Metaphilosophy

The Leuven Research Group in Classical German Philosophy (LCGP) invites abstracts for the yearly Leuven Kant Conference. We intend the conference to provide a space for open exchange between established scholars, early career researchers, and PhD students. The 2025 edition of the conference is devoted to a particular topic and all speakers will be selected on the basis of their abstracts.

Whereas the quest for a new philosophical method was a goal shared by many modern philosophers, Kant was arguably among the first to take reflections on philosophy to be part of philosophy as such. He conceived of the Critique of Pure Reason as a court for settling philosophical controversies (Axi) and aimed to establish a new kind of philosophy, which he called transcendental philosophy. In another context, he termed this new philosophy a “metaphysics of metaphysics” (AA 10: 269). Kant further used the term “critical philosophy” (AA 05: 5) to denote his inquiries into both the theoretical and practical domains of human rationality. In addition, Kant distinguished between a scholastic and a cosmic concept of philosophy and conceived of the latter as “the science of the relation of all cognition to the essential ends of human reason” (A 839/B 867), thereby suggesting that philosophy is pertinent to existential questions. No less significantly, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant claims that the concept of purposiveness is key to bringing together the theoretical and practical uses of reason, which suggests that teleological motives are central to Kant’s conception of philosophy as a whole. This raises the question as to whether these various accounts of philosophy are coherent.

In view of this apparent plurality, the conference aims to foreground Kant’s views on the tasks and status of philosophy. While we welcome contributions on any aspect of this theme, we are particularly interested in papers that address understudied aspects of Kant’s metaphilosophy. Topics may include, but are not limited to, Kant’s understanding of:

•    the relationship between metaphysics, transcendental philosophy, and philosophy as such
•    the scientific nature of philosophy
•    the relationship between philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences
•    the peculiarity of philosophy in comparison with other expressions of human rationality such as art, anthropology, history, or religion
•    the task of philosophy and the task of the philosopher
•    the cosmic and the scholastic concepts of philosophy
•    the social and/or political dimension of philosophy
•  the task of philosophy in relation to the way he actually proceeds in his various works
•  the relationship between philosophy and the history of philosophy
•   the relationship between philosophy and the didactics of philosophy