Augustin Dumont

Augustin Dumont is currently Associate Professor in German Philosophy at the Université de Montréal (Canada). He also held the Canadian Research Chair in Transcendental Philosophy (2016-2021).
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After completing a Master's degree at the UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve), I earned a PhD in Philosophy from the UCLouvain (Saint-Louis - Brussels), in 2011. There I worked as a faculty lecturer and then as an adjunct professor 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 la Recherche Scientifique (2012-2015), while working as an associate researcher at the Collège d’études 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. I also held the Canadian Research Chair in Transcendental Philosophy (Tier 2) (2016-2021). In 2020, I became an Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal.

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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 Kantianism, German idealism and German romanticism, a (post-)Kantian backdrop, in other words. But I also draw on many currents of modern and contemporary philosophy and on other disciplines (psychoanalysis, aesthetics). 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.
Phone: 514-343-6111 # 30890
Address: Pavillon 2910, Boulevard Edouard-Montpetit
CP 6128 Succursale Centre-Ville
Montréal (QC)  H3C 3J7
Canada