The Significance and Limits of Self-Consciousness in Kant and Post-Kantianism

Kant is frequently credited with articulating self-consciousness as the fundamental principle not only of philosophy, but of human mindedness overall. Thought, cognition, action, and judgment are all taken to be modes or actualizations of the self-conscious unity of the human mind. Starting with Reinhold and Jacobi, the immediate post-Kantian aftermath was characterized by a concern with the ramifications and problems of making self-consciousness the center of philosophy. Fichte’s concern with summons and recognition, as well as the unity of subject and object, both taken up and transformed by Hegel and Schelling, emerged as further focal points. Ultimately, Kant’s master idea proved fruitful for virtually all avenues of philosophical thought.

Recent decades of scholarship on Kant and post-Kantianism have been marked by a renewed interest in the philosophical purpose of emphasizing self-consciousness: what are the reasons that classical German philosophy places apperceptive unity at its center? One answer is that the self constitutes an exalted and important topic of philosophical theory-building: on this view, we need to become clear about our own mind in order to provide a foundation for our thoughts about, and actions towards, the world. Another answer denies this opposition of self-consciousness and world-consciousness: on this view, philosophy from Kant onwards does not take the self as a separable entity, nor self-consciousness as one region of philosophical inquiry among others, but rather treats apperceptive unity as the all-encompassing unity of mind and world. The question at issue between these two options is whether, and if so in what sense, there is an outside to self-consciousness.

This issue of the significance and limits of self-consciousness has profound ramifications for virtually all philosophical questions. To engage with Kant and the post-Kantians, we need to understand whether questions of existence, knowledge, beauty, faith, or good and evil lie within the scope of self-consciousness or lead us beyond it. The conference brings together leading scholars and junior researchers from different interpretive traditions to discuss the status of self-consciousness in (post-)Kantian thought.