Workshop: Kant on Inner Sense, Self-Consciousness, and Self-Affection
9–10 December 2025 | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Organized by Tobias Rosefeldt & Marharyta Rouba (HU Berlin).
This workshop brings together discussions of inner sense, self-affection, and self-consciousness in Kant’s critical philosophy – themes that have attracted considerable attention in the literature yet continue to raise questions and invite divergent, sometimes contradictory, interpretations. The workshop will address such issues as the features and content of inner sense; the functioning of self-affection; the contribution of both inner sense and self-affection to the formation of conscious representations as well as empirical and transcendental self-consciousness; and Kant’s notion of an indeterminate empirical inner intuition (or the perception of the self) in its relation to the formal, pure structure of self-consciousness. Furthermore, by examining the distinction between the formal unity of apperception and inner intuition, the workshop seeks to shed light on the complex interplay between activity and receptivity in self-consciousness.
In addition to invited presentations, the programme of the workshop will include a collaborative reading session focusing on selected passages from Kant’s texts on inner sense and self-affection. Below you will find the full programme.
Registration:
To participate in person or online, please contact Marharyta Rouba (marharyta.rouba.1@student.hu-berlin.de). Please note that in-person participation is limited.
Programme
Tuesday, 9 December 2025
Location: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Main Building, Ground Floor, Room 1066e
14:00 – 14:10 Workshop Opening
14:10 – 15:30 Juuso Rantanen (King’s College London / Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, UK / Germany): Intellectualism and Pure Intuitions – A New Problem
15:30 – 15:50 Coffee Break
15:50 – 17:10 Janum Sethi (University of Michigan, USA): Self-Affection and the Subjective Sequence of Apprehension
17:10 – 17:30 Coffee Break
17:30 – 18:35 Reading Session: Excerpts from Kant on inner sense
19:00 – … Dinner
Wednesday, 10 December 2025
Location: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Main Building, Ground Floor, Room 1066e
10:00 – 11:20 Marharyta Rouba (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany): “Wait, I Can’t Sense Myself?!”: Analogy and Disanalogy Between Kant’s Transcendental Subject and Transcendental Object in Themselves
11:20 – 11:40 Coffee Break
11:40 – 13:00 Jonas Indregard (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway): Self-Consciousness, Inner Sensation, and Logic
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch
14:30 – 15:50 Yibin Liang (Beijing Normal University, China): Indeterminate Empirical Inner Intuition and the Structure of Apperception in Kant
15:50 – 16:10 Coffee Break
16:10 – 17:30 Tobias Rosefeldt (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany): There is no Self-Consciousness without Inner Sense in Kant
18:00 – … Dinner
