Westerkamp, Dirk
Senior Fellow: April–September 2017
Research Project: Scepticism and Schematism: The Logotectonic Progress of Transcendental Scepticism from Moses Mendelssohn to Salomon Maimon
The period between Kant’s sceptical refutation of Moses Mendelssohn’s reification of metaphysics and Salomon Maimon’s scepticist meta-critique of Kant’s critical transcendentalism seems to be one of the most fruitful periods of scepticism, albeit not fully illuminated in its inner logic of argumentation. Dirk Westerkamp’s research project seeks to examine the debates and arguments of transcendentalism’s encounter with scepticism in the early 1790s. Emphasis is thus given to the logotectonic (that is: rational) structure of philosophical and sceptical reasoning during the period between Mendelssohn’s Morgenstunden and Maimon’s Neue Logik (1785–1794/5). The project will thus focus on the relationship between rationality, symbolic language, and schematism in Mendelssohn, Kant, Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon. The project shall result in a text of some 150 pages, which will form the core chapters of a book on the topic.
Dirk Westerkamp is professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Kiel. He has been a research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at Harvard University, and at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences.