Colloquium: “Kant’s Awakenings” – Desmond Hogan, Princeton University
October 9 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Friday, October 9, 2026
4:00 – 6:00 PM
Dodd Hall 321
RSVP HERE
Join us on Friday, October 9, 2026, for a colloquium with Desmond Hogan, Princeton University. The talk will take place from 4:00 – 6:00 PM with a reception to follow.
Kant’s Awakenings
In a famous biographical reflection on the origin of his epochal Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes that Hume’s analysis of causation “first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy” (Prolegomena 4:260). We encounter strikingly similar language in Kant’s explanation elsewhere that his Critique arose out of a discovery of an antinomy of pure reason centered on “unavoidable” contradictions in realist theories of space and time: “This was what first woke me from the dogmatic slumber and drove me to the critique of reason in order to solve the scandal of the apparent contradiction of reason with itself” (Correspondence 12:258; Prolegomena 4:338). Notwithstanding efforts to join the dots between these two “awakenings,” it remains the overwhelming consensus of experts that they must describe unrelated motivations and events. I argue here that Kant’s awakenings are intimately related, and this relation vindicates his further assertion that “the origin of the critical philosophy is morality, with respect to the imputability of action” (Ak. 20:335).
Desmond Hogan is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He began his studies in his hometown of Galway in the beautiful west of Ireland and received his Ph.D. from Yale University. His research interests include metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics, and aesthetics, with a focus on the modern period and nineteenth century.
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