Revolution of Modernity: Descartes, Kant and Hegel

MARCH 9, 2026 · 1 HOUR 18 MINUTES · HISTORY OF IDEAS CLUB · REVOLUTION OF THOUGHT

How did Descartes, Kant and Hegel transform the modern understanding of reason, knowledge, freedom and historical change?

Episode summary

This seminar follows a central trajectory in modern philosophy. Descartes made the thinking subject the starting point of certainty; Kant examined the conditions that make knowledge possible; and Hegel reimagined reason as something that develops historically through conflict and transformation.

Read together, the three thinkers reveal modernity as an intellectual revolution rather than a simple break with tradition. The episode asks how their different systems changed the relationship between mind and world, individual freedom and collective history.

Episode guide

• Descartes, doubt and the thinking subject
• Kant’s Copernican turn in philosophy
• Freedom, autonomy and the limits of reason
• Hegel, dialectic and the historical development of consciousness

Sources and further reading

• René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781).
• Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784).
• G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).

Transcript

A full transcript is in preparation. This page provides an accessible summary and episode guide in the meantime.

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