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Augustin Dumont

Intersection de l'idéalisme allemand, du romantisme allemand et du kantisme

Professeur agrégé

Faculté des arts et des sciences - Département de philosophie

2910, boul. Édouard-Montpetit, room 400

514 343-6111 #30890

augustin.dumont@umontreal.ca

Profile

Research expertise

My doctoral dissertation focused on the articulation of the transcendental imagination to language and affectivity in the works of Fichte and Novalis. My starting point is the intersection of German idealism and German romanticism (drawing mainly on Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Novalis, Schlegel, Tieck, Hoffmann and Kleist), a post-Kantian backdrop, in other words. But I also draw on many currents of modern and contemporary philosophy and on other disciplines, psychoanalysis in particular. From this foundation, I am working on developing a renewed transcendental philosophy, assuming its dual performative and perspectivist dimension, at the junction of "theorization" and poièsis, i.e. philosophical "doing" as a writing practice (doing justice both to the conceptual and abstract discourse and to the literary and poetic register and their interaction). Within this framework, I am interested in particular in the sensitive experience, following the thread of imagination and fiction. I am also examining the questions of nothingness and negativity and of the possible and impossible; in addition, I am interested in the relations between transcendentalism and historicity or between transcendentalism and the philosophy of nature. By contributing in this way to both epistemology and philosophical anthropology, I am trying to bring the transcendental gesture by various means back to what Fichte termed its initial "problematicity." The issue for me is not so much to permanently assign the transcendental to a particular epistemological tradition (realism, idealism, etc.), nor to illustrate a given clearly limited ontology, as it is to recognize a privileged reflexive strategy for it: that of the speculative genesis of different possible perspectives on the world, i.e. different types of knowledge of our relationship with the world. This kind of genesis is inseparable from these many perspectives yet cannot be reduced to them, since it is not one of many perspectives but nonetheless remains a singular perspective that must be seen in a relationship of productive tension with its "other" perspectives and with empiricism in general. In this way I am seeking to reactivate the dimension of imagination implicit in any transcendental quest for conditions of possibility of our relationship with the world and knowledge of the world, and to question anew the possibility of "attesting" in common to these conditions from their character as necessary fiction. In that respect, the transcendental is seen as a constant rewriting process rather than as a set of decrees whose necessary character always risks becoming arbitrary. The goal is to envisage transcendental philosophy as a true experiment, where the enigma of our finitude is indefinitely re-elaborated and interpreted.

Biography

After completing a Master's degree at the Université de Louvain-la-Neuve, I earned a PhD in Philosophy from the Saint-Louis University, Brussels, in 2011. There I worked as a faculty lecturer (2006-2011) and then as an adjunct professor (2011-2014) and Co-Director of the Centre Prospéro - Langage, image et connaissance. After my dissertation, I completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Vienna and the Technische Universität Berlin, before obtaining a three-year position as a researcher with the Belgian Fonds National de recherches scientifiques (2012-2015), while working as an associate researcher at the Centre d'étude de la philosophie classique allemande at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne. I was then awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, allowing me to continue my research at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften until the summer of 2015. I was hired as an Assistant Professor in German Philosophy at the Université de Montréal in the fall of 2015.

Affiliations and responsabilities

Teaching and supervision

Student supervision

Theses and dissertation supervision (Papyrus Institutional Repository)

2023

Jung, lecteur de Kant

Graduate : Maynard, Camille
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.
2019

La Construction de la matière dans la Naturphilosophie de F. W. J. Schelling (1797-1800)

Graduate : LeClerc, Jérémie
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.
2019

Éthique de la négation : le problème de l'ascétisme chez Schopenhauer

Graduate : Paraskevopoulos, Daniel
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.
2018

Trajectoires de l’Aufklärung : autour de la polémique Kant-Herder

Graduate : Ferland, Vincent
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.

Projects

Research projects

2016 - 2022

chaire du Canada en Philosophie transcendantale

Lead researcher : Augustin Dumont
Funding sources: SPIIE/Secrétariat des programmes interorganismes à l’intention des établissements
Grant programs: PVX50399-Chaires de recherche du Canada
2018 - 2019

Repenser le possible

Lead researcher : Augustin Dumont
Funding sources: CRSH/Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada
Grant programs: PV152160-Subvention Connexion

Outreach

Publications and presentations

Disciplines

  • Philosophy
  • Anthropology
  • History
  • Sociology

Areas of expertise

  • German idealism
  • Transcendental philosophy
  • German romanticism
  • Philosophy of the imagination
  • Philosophy of the image
  • Philosophy and literature
  • Philosophical anthropology
  • Daseinsanalysis
  • Psychoanalysis