Over the past decades there has been increasing interest in the idea that Heidegger was a “transcendental philosopher” during the late 1920s. Furthermore, a consensus has started to emerge around the idea that Heidegger must be thought of as a transcendental thinker during this time. For the most part this means to first experience how Heidegger's work inherits this term from Kant or Husserl so that one can then experience how Heidegger creatively adapts this inheritance. The aim of this paper (...) is to show that such an approach is unhelpful. The aim of this paper is instead to show that transcendental philosophy bears a wholly renewed meaning in Heidegger's fundamental ontology and that this meaning must be understood in an intrinsic connection with the fundamental-ontological problem of transcendence. Articulating this connection will show how Heidegger makes transcendental philosophy properly phenomenological. Over the past decades there has been increasing interest in the idea that Heidegger was a “transcendental philosopher” during the late 1920s. Furthermore, a consensus has started to emerge around the idea that Heidegger must be thought of as a transcendental thinker during this time. For the most part this means to first experience how Heidegger's work inherits this term from Kant or Husserl so that one can then experience how Heidegger creatively adapts this inheritance. The aim of this paper is to show that such an approach is unhelpful. The aim of this paper is instead to show that transcendental philosophy bears a wholly renewed meaning in Heidegger's fundamental ontology and that this meaning must be understood in an intrinsic connection with the fundamental-ontological problem of transcendence. Articulating this connection will show how Heidegger makes transcendental philosophy properly phenomenological. For a brief time during the late 1920s Heidegger speaks of his philosophical vision in “transcendental” terms; indeed, the title for the whole first part of Being and Time even speaks of winning a specifically “transcendental horizon” for the question of being. Conversely, the past few decades have seen an increasing interest in transcendental philosophy. Indeed, one might even say that there has been a renewed desire for the transcendental – for its rationality, for its metaphysical power and loftiness, for its epistemological armour or for its power to unify traditions – and this desire has lead to all sorts of “transcendental interpretations of … ” Accordingly, while under other circumstances Heidegger's talk of the transcendental might have been brushed under the rug as a “metaphysical” embarrassment it has instead become increasingly commonplace for scholars to thematically engage with this aspect of Heidegger's work. Properly speaking, there is no getting around the way that Heidegger positions his work in transcendental terms during the late 1920s. But language is a mercurial thing; so if there is no getting around the idea that there is something “transcendental” about Heidegger's work from the late 1920s, there is equally no getting around the question concerning the meaning of this ascription. What does it mean to be transcendental? What does it mean for Heidegger to be transcendental? These are questions which remain for us, and how we respond to these questions will have a significant effect on our reading of Heidegger. In fact, as this paper will demonstrate by example, how we respond to these questions has a significant effect on our understanding of the meaning and demands of the “task of thinking” as presented to us by Heidegger's work from the late 1920s. The question about the meaning of the term “transcendental” in Heidegger's late 20s philosophy is both modest and immodest. On the one hand it is a very small topic – perhaps, one might even suspect, a merely pedantic one – but on the other hand it aims at the highest question, namely, the Seinsfrage. In order to investigate these questions I will begin by presenting the most common contemporary interpretations of Heidegger's transcendental philosophising in connection with some reflections on the history of the concept of the transcendental. Secondly, I will demonstrate the formal meaning of the word “transcendental” in Heidegger. Thirdly, working from this foundation I will more fully clarify the meaning of a Heideggerian transcendental philosophy through an investigation of the concepts, problems and phenomena arising from the preceding analysis. Here, in §3, the significance of Heidegger's concept of the “transcendental” is explicitly grappled with. (shrink)

This article discusses the gap in Martin Heidegger’s ontology pertaining to the transformative affectivity arising in the interactions between beings, particularly how this affectivity is responsible for changes in those beings. It thus explores the possibility of bridging this gap by including an additional dimension of being. For this purpose, it draws upon Aristotle’s concept of affecting/being affected (On Generation and Corruption, Book I), which aims to explain the origin of alteration in beings. The Aristotelian juxtaposition of action and passion (...) serves as a backdrop for the incorporation of the concept of “shapeability” into Heidegger’s ontology. This involves a dimension of revealing being related to the active and passive aspects of beings’ capacity to shape and be shaped by others. Investigating the idea of shapeability, I shall argue, can shed some new light on the multidimensionality of how being is disclosed. (shrink)

The chapter discusses Quentin Meillassoux's recent interpretation and critique of Heidegger's philosophical position, which he describes as "strong correlationism." It emphasizes the fact that Meillassoux situates Heidegger in the post-Kantian tradition of transcendental idealism that he defines in terms of a focus on the correlation between being and thinking. It is argued that Meillassoux's "speculative" attempt to overcome the Kantian philosophical framework in the name of absolute contingency should be understood as a further development and dialectical overcoming of its ultimate (...) contemporary form, the Heideggerian philosophy of finitude. (shrink)

ABSTRACT There is general agreement that Kant’s thought strongly influenced Heidegger’s. Nevertheless, there is still much work to be done in order to fully appreciate this influence. A central theme to disclose the relation between these authors is the role they give to the transcendental. In this paper I show that Kant’s account of intuition is the focus of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant in his Die Frage nach dem Ding, since Heidegger interprets Kant’s treatment of intuition as a delimiting of (...) the modern mathematical tendency to determine everything out of pure reason alone. I argue that this interpretation is at the basis of Heidegger’s appropriation of Kant’s synthetic a priori in this work, the aim of which is to take this notion away from the sphere of the objects of mathematical physical science, and place it in the realm of everyday experience. I claim that Heidegger thinks that this move can only be accomplished by removing universality and necessity from Kant’s a priori. Finally, I show that Heidegger’s appropriation of Kant’s synthetic a priori goes together with and illuminates his understanding of transcendence as das Zwischen, ‘the between us and things’. RESUMO É consenso geral que o pensar de Kant influenciou fortemente o pensar de Heidegger. Porém, há ainda muito trabalho a fazer para se conseguir apreciar essa influência plenamente. Um tema crucial para conseguir expor a relação entre esses dois autores é o rol que ambos dão ao transcendental. Neste artigo, vou mostrar que o tratamento que Kant faz da intuição é o foco da interpretação que Heidegger oferece acerca de Kant em sua obra Die Frage nach dem Ding, dado que Heidegger interpreta o jeito como Kant trabalha a intuição como uma delimitação da tendência matemática moderna a determiná- lo tudo pelo só uso da razão pura. Argumento que essa interpretação está na base da apropriação que Heidegger faz do sintético a priori kantiano nesta obra, cujo fim é tirar essa noção fora da esfera dos objetos da ciência físico- matemática e posicioná-la no reino da experiência cotidiana. Sustento que Heidegger pensa que isto só pode ser alcançado ao eliminar a necessidade e a universalidade do a priori kantiano. Finalmente, mostro que a apropriação que Heidegger faz do sintético a priori kantiano vai junto e ilumina sua compreensão da transcendência como o das Zwischen, ‘o entre nós e as coisas’. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall examine the evolution of Heidegger’s concept of ‘transcendence’ as it appears in Being and Time (1927), ‘On the Essence of Ground’ (1928) and related texts from the late 1920s in relation to his rethinking of subjectivity and intentionality. Heidegger defines Being as ‘transcendence’ in Being and Time and reinterprets intentionality in terms of the transcendence of Dasein. In the critical epistemological tradition of philosophy stemming from Kant, as in Husserl, transcendence and immanence are key notions (...) (see Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 1907, and Ideas I, 1913). Indeed, ‘transcendence in immanence’ is a leitmotif of Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl discusses transcendence in some detail in Cartesian Meditations §11 in a manner that is not dissimilar to Heidegger. Heidegger is critical of Husserl’s understanding of consciousness and intentionality and Heidegger deliberately chooses to discuss transcendence as an exceptional domain for the discussion of beings in his ‘On the Essence of Ground’, his submission to Husserl’s seventieth-birthday Festschrift. Despite his championing of a new concept of transcendence in the late 1920s, Heidegger effectively abandons the term during the early 1930s. In this paper, I shall explore Heidegger’s articulation of his new ontological conception of finite transcendence and compare it with Husserl’s conception of the transcendence of the ego in order to get clearer what is at stake in Heidegger’s conceptions of subjectivity, Dasein and transcendence. (shrink)

Each thinker, according to Heidegger, essentially thinks one thought. Plato thinks the idea. Descartes thinks the cogito . Spinoza thinks substance. Nietzsche thinks the will to power. If a thinker does not think a thought, then he or she is not a thinker. He or she may be a scholar or a professor, a producer or a consumer, a fan or a fake, but he or she would not be a thinker. Thus, if Heidegger is a thinker, he essentially thinks (...) one thought. What is Heidegger’s one thought? It is neither life nor death, neither me nor you. It is neither technology nor art. It is neither spirit nor language. Heidegger’s one thought is being—or more precisely, the question of the meaning of being. And what is being? Neither presence nor absence--but rather, an ambiguous uncertainty. (shrink)

One of Heidegger’s enduring concerns was to develop an original meditation on the meaning of the present. Integral to this attempt is his critique of the understanding of the bein...

Este artigo apresenta uma análise da abordagem de Heidegger à dialética transcendental no contexto de sua interpretação da Crítica da Razão Pura de Kant. Inicialmente, reconstruo a interpretação fenomenológica da Crítica da Razão Pura como sendo uma fundamentação da metafísica. A seguir, apresento a compreensão de Heidegger sobre o que ele chamou de significado positivo da dialética transcendental. O foco principal de sua interpretação é a noção de ilusão transcendental. Concluo este artigo examinando a noção de uma ilusão original, que (...) Heidegger concebe como mais básica do que a ilusão transcendental examinada por Kant. Enfatizo que as subreções transcendentais que Kant explicou na dialética transcendental são interpretadas por Heidegger como casos particulares de uma confusão mais geral, cuja origem pertence à própria estrutura da compreensão do ser. (shrink)