September 17 – 18, 2019
This workshop featured seven talks on Kant’s notion of the self from a psychological and from a moral perspective. The two perspectives have traditionally been understood to be in tension with one another. On the one hand, from a theoretical perspective, our psychological knowledge of ourselves seems severely limited. On the other hand, from a practical perspective, leading a morally dutiful life seems to rely on the capacity for reflection and self-understanding. The overall aim of this workshop was to show that the psychological and the moral perspective in fact complement each other, since the impossibility of definite self-knowledge is a necessary counterpart of the possibility of autonomous self-determination. The workshop thus aimed to developing a more coherent understanding of Kant’s conception of the self, shedding light, in particular, on his understanding of the relation between psychological self-knowledge and autonomous self-constitution.