Dogmatic Slumber

In the annals of Western philosophical history, few anecdotes are quoted with such reverent regularity as Immanuel Kant’s dramatic awakening from his „dogmatic slumber.“ In the preface to his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Kant famously made his monumental confession: „I freely admit that the suggestion of David Hume was the very thing which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction.“ For over two centuries, university curricula and hagiographic biographies have presented this awakening as a heroic turning point in modern intellectual…