This paper argues that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy attempts to reopen the question of human transcendence in contemporary terms. While his conception of language as self-transcending is deeply Husserlian, Ricoeur also responds to the analytical challenge when he deploys a basic distinction in Fregean logic in order to clarify Heidegger’s phenomenology of world. Ricoeur’s commitment to a transcendental view is evident in his conception of narrative, which enables him to emphasize the role of the performative in literary reading. The meaning (...) of the self in time provides Ricoeur with a discursive basis for distinguishing his own position from that of Kant and other philosophers in the transcendental tradition. (shrink)

The idea that subjectivity makes up the foundation or source of all objectivity applies to all transcendental idealists. Nevertheless, Husserl conceives of this relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in a radically different fashion than Kant. Husserl’s conception leads to a primacy of the noetic dimension of sense at the expense of the noematic dimension. In order to render this explicit, not only a closer look at Kant’s transcendental deduction is illuminating but also taking into account neo-Kantianism. In contrast to Husserl, (...) Kant and the neo-Kantians grant primacy to the objective or noematic within the correlation between subject and object or noesis and noema. (shrink)