Il risveglio dal sonno dogmatico e la rivoluzione del 1772

In the present paper I want to demonstrate that the Kant’s awakening from the dogmatic slumber, which is often associated to the reading of Hume, finds its complete achievement only by means of the incorporation of Aristotelian doctrines. If Hume provided a critique of the concept of “causality” and conceived it as mere mental representation, for Kant, Aristotle provided a “new way” to conceive all the concepts of the understanding, even if unsystematically. Kant found the solution of his epistemological problem in the particular Aristotelian tradition of Königsberg, according to which categories were mental constructions or concepts of a mental order. Kant’s debt to Aristotelianism for the awakening is evident in his “terminological turn” of the years 1771-1772, in which appeared for the first time important Aristotelian terms such as “category”, “schema”, “dialectic” and “analytic”. Kant’s awakening, influenced by Aristotelianism, was possible during this period because he was librarian at the Schlossbibliothek, where he had available a large library holdings of the Aristotelian tradition.