CFP: Leuven Kant Conference 2019: Kant's Transcendental Dialectic

The Leuven Research Group in Classical German Philosophy (LCGP) invites submissions of abstracts for the yearly Leuven Kant Conference.

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.

We invite proposals on any aspect of the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Given the wide scope of this division of the work, we do not plan to include papers on the Dialectic chapters of the second and third Critiques, the reception of Kant’s Dialectic by post-Kantians, or the notion of dialectic in philosophers other than Kant. 

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• The arguments in the Transcendental Dialectic
• Kant’s notion of dialectic in general
• The aim and nature of Kant’s engagement with former metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectic
• Kant’s interlocutors and the immediate historical context of the Transcendental Dialectic
• The unity or disunity of the Transcendental Dialectic’s chapters: the Paralogisms, Antinomies and Ideal
• Transcendental illusion
• Kant’s account of phenomena and noumena in relation to the Transcendental Dialectic
• Kant’s conception of the ideas of reason
• The relation between the Appendix and the main part of the Transcendental Dialectic
• The relation between Kant’s pre-critical works and the Transcendental Dialectic

Abstracts (no more than 500 words) should be sent in word format, as attachment, to [email protected]  

Abstracts, including the title, should be prepared for double-blind review by removing any identification details. The author’s name, paper title, institutional position and affiliation, as well as contact information, should be included in the body of the email.

Presentation time will be 25 minutes + 20 minutes for discussion. We offer limited travel grants to PhD students without funding of their own.

Notification of acceptance by February 10, 2019.