Abstract

In his book Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, Peter E. Gordon attempts to reconstruct the historical circumstances which shaped Martin Heidegger’s and Ernst Cassirer’s debate at Davos in 1929, as well as outline the key points of contention in their arguments. Gordon argues that the primary source of disagreement between Heidegger and Cassirer lies in their different concepts of what it means to be human. In this review essay, I argue that rather than a “conceptual” or “thematic” divide, the divergence between them is primarily methodological, and, in Heidegger’s case, unfolds on two fronts: first, by shifting the focus of philosophy away from the modern concern for “man” in favor of the question of being, and, secondly, by pioneering a new strategy for reading the history of philosophy that emphasizes the “historical [geschichtlich]” as the recovery of the past in terms of its relevance for the future, versus providing a “historically [historisch]” accurate record of what has been.