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
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
Research affiliations
Research units
Titulaire
Membre
Teaching and supervision
Teaching
Courses taught (current session only)
- PHI-2195 – Idéalisme allemand
- PHI-2430 – La philosophie pratique de Kant
- PHI-3640 – Hegel
- PHI-6280 – Philosophie allemande 2
Programs
- 108510 – Baccalauréat en études allemandes
- 108520 – Majeure en études allemandes
- 108710 – Baccalauréat en études allemandes et histoire
- 108710 – Baccalauréat en études allemandes et histoire
- 114815 – Baccalauréat en littératures de langue française et philosophie
- 114815 – Baccalauréat en littératures de langue française et philosophie
- 116310 – Baccalauréat en lettres et sciences humaines
- 119510 – Baccalauréat en philosophie
- 119520 – Majeure en philosophie
- 119540 – Mineure en philosophie
- 119910 – Baccalauréat en philosophie et études classiques
- 124710 – Baccalauréat en science politique et philosophie
- 183518 – Baccalauréat en enseignement de l'éthique et de la culture religieuse au secondaire
- 219510 – Maîtrise en enseignement de la philosophie au collégial
- 248510 – Maîtrise en sciences cliniques
- 251660 – Microprogramme de 2e cycle en éthique clinique pédiatrique
Student supervision
Theses and dissertation supervision (Papyrus Institutional Repository)
La Construction de la matière dans la Naturphilosophie de F. W. J. Schelling (1797-1800)
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.
Le processus de formation des habitudes dans la pensée de Friedrich Nietzsche durant la décennie de 1880.
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.
Sur la réappropriation hégélienne du scepticisme dans les oeuvres de Iéna (1801-1807) : le laboratoire de Hegel
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.
Éthique de la négation : le problème de l'ascétisme chez Schopenhauer
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.
L'aperception pure ou la distance de l'objet : une étude sur la subjectivité dans la Critique de la raison pure.
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.
Trajectoires de l’Aufklärung : autour de la polémique Kant-Herder
Cycle : Master's
Grade : M.A.
Projects
Research projects
chaire du Canada en Philosophie transcendantale
Repenser le possible
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