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The Philosopher's Shirt

This is my dogmatic slumber Shirt

Before Hume interrupted him, Kant was resting comfortably in unexamined assumptions. This tee is a small act of solidarity with that phase.

Only Kant readers get it, and they get it instantly. Everything in one place, across every format we print it on, made to order. A funny philosophy gift for Kant readers. Do not wake me. Hume can wait.

Questions about this design

What does the This Is My Dogmatic Slumber design show?
Immanuel Kant in a nightcap, candle in hand, ready for bed, next to the caption This is my dogmatic slumber. Kant famously said that David Hume woke him from his dogmatic slumber; this is the outfit for going back to sleep, deliberately, on a lazy Sunday. Only Kant readers get it, and they get it instantly.
What does dogmatic slumber mean?
Kant’s phrase for the comfortable state of accepting philosophical assumptions without examining them. For him it meant the rationalist metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff, which claimed to know God, the soul and the world by pure reason alone, without first asking what reason can actually know.
Who woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber?
David Hume. In the preface to his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) Kant writes that “the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber” and gave his research in speculative philosophy a completely different direction.
What was Hume’s problem of causation?
In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume argued that we never observe a necessary connection between cause and effect – only one event regularly following another. Our belief in causation comes from habit, not from reason. Kant set out to answer this challenge.
What is Kant’s Copernican revolution?
In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, second edition 1787) Kant proposes that instead of our knowledge conforming to objects, objects must conform to the structures of our mind – space, time and the categories such as causality. Like Copernicus, he changes the point of view to explain what was puzzling.
What is the thing in itself in Kant?
The thing in itself, Ding an sich, is reality as it is independently of how it appears to us. Kant argues we can only know things as they appear – as phenomena shaped by our forms of intuition and categories. The thing in itself can be thought, but never known.
What are synthetic a priori judgments?
Judgments that add new information (synthetic) yet are known independently of experience (a priori). Kant’s examples include mathematics, such as 7 + 5 = 12, and the principle that every event has a cause. Showing how such judgments are possible is the central task of the Critique of Pure Reason.
Was Kant’s daily routine really so regular?
Largely, yes. Kant lived almost his whole life in Königsberg and kept a strict schedule of writing, lecturing, a long lunch with guests and an afternoon walk. The anecdote that neighbours set their clocks by his walk is a later embellishment, but his punctuality was famous even in his lifetime.
Which Kant books should I read first?
Start with the short essay An Answer to the Question – What Is Enlightenment? (1784), with its motto sapere aude, dare to know. The Prolegomena (1783) is Kant’s own introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) is the most accessible entry to his ethics.
Who is the This Is My Dogmatic Slumber design a good gift for?
For philosophy students in the middle of a Kant seminar, teachers who assign the Critique, lovers of long naps and anyone who prefers not to be woken by Hume before noon. It comes on a t-shirt, a sweatshirt, a premium hoodie, a mug and a sticker.