Kant's Response To Hume

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In general, I work on Kant’s theoretical philosophy and its relation to his predecessors both in Germany and England. Some of this work concerns Kant’s relationship to well known figures in the early modern period, such as Hume and Locke, while other work concerns his relationship to important but often neglected eighteenth-century German figures, such as Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, J.G. Sulzer, Nicholas Tetens, and J.G. Hamann. More narrowly, my focus has been on the following questions:
(1) What is Kant’s relationship to his empiricist predecessors (especially Hume but to a lesser extent Locke), and how does he understand this relationship? (2) What is Kant’s attitude toward skepticism, and how is it manifest in the arguments of the Critique of Pure Reason? (3) What is Kant’s argument …show more content…
I address these questions in my dissertation, Metaphysics and the Critical Method: Reexamining Kant’s Response to Hume, in which I examine neglected aspects of Kant’s response to Hume and show that this response and Kant’s critique of metaphysics are more closely connected than is generally supposed. Many of the positions I defend there are developed more fully in my published and forthcoming work, which engages with recent and influential interpretations of Kant’s relationship to Hume by Michael Forster, Paul Guyer, Gary Hatfield, Manfred Kuehn, Eric Watkins, and Wayne Waxman as well as Michelle Grier’s work on transcendental illusion. The tendency in Kant scholarship has been to interpret Kant’s relationship to Hume narrowly. The familiar narrative is that Hume’s account of causation presented Kant with a challenge. Hume denies the a priori origin of the concept of cause and so the a priori justification of all causal judgments, and Kant responds to a generalized version of these denials in the Metaphysical and Transcendental Deductions

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