Hume and Kant’s Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber: Revisited

Immanuel Kant says in Prolegomena that “the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber”. Despite this confession, it is still not clear just how Hume awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber. Interpreters’ disagreement springs from the fact that there is no consensus over any aspect of this influence. Did Hume’s critique of causality awake Kant, or his discussion of antinomies of imagination? If the former is the case, which discussion of causality? Has Kant been familiar with Hume’s own works? In the introduction of the paper, we distinguish three different questions. In the first part of the paper, we deal with the historical aspect of Hume’s influence on Kant and the degree of Kant’s familiarity with Hume’s two famous works, Treatise and Enquiry. In the second part, firstly, we deal with the interpretative aspect of Kant’s relation to Hume and argue that it was Hume’s discussion and critique of the epistemic and semantic status of “general causal principle” in Treatise which finally awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber. If our account of Hume’s major influence on Kant is accepted, then Hume’s other impacts should be explicated light of our explanation. In conclusion, we offer some of the findings of this paper.