When Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Judgement, takes on the task of throwing a bridge between the “great gulf” that separates the domain of freedom from the domain of nature, he addresses a philosophical problem that becomes one of the central themes within the German Idealist tradition.
Building on Kant’s work, but also strongly criticizing the dualisms that underlie it, the philosophers within German Idealism sought to conceptualize the internal unity between human freedom and nature. Because of the systematic and interdisciplinary nature of these attempts, German Idealist thought seems to be preeminently suited to address contemporary questions about our (distorted) relation to nature. The purpose of the symposium is therefore to explore the way in which transcendental and speculative idealism can offer insights into this relation.