Leuven Kant Conference 2019: Kant's Transcendental Dialectic

The upcoming edition of the Leuven Kant Conference differs from preceding ones in two respects. We will not make a distinction between keynote speakers and participants selected on the basis of their abstracts, and we intend the conference to provide a space for open exchange between established scholars, early career researchers, and PhD students. Moreover, the conference will be devoted to a specific topic: Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic.

Kant famously claimed in a letter to Garve that he was awoken from his dogmatic slumber by his identification of the antinomy of pure reason, which he took to represent ‘the scandal of the ostensible contradiction of reason with itself’. In this sense, the Critique of Pure Reason can be said to owe its impetus to the critique of metaphysics carried out in Transcendental Dialectic, more specifically, its analysis of the ‘natural and unavoidable illusion’ that emerges in attempts to obtain a priori knowledge of the soul, the world as such, and God. However, the section was all-but ignored by many early commentators. Following in the wake of the monographs by Wood, Ameriks, and Grier, more recent studies provide valuably focused accounts of specific parts and aspects of the text. Yet they often do not connect Kant’s various claims in the Dialectic and tend to ignore its systematic place in Kant’s theoretical philosophy. The aim of the conference is to examine the Dialectic in light of this wider context.