Speaker: Jae Hetterley

Title: 'Heidegger's Kantianism in Being and Time'

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates Heidegger's intellectual development at a specific historical moment: the centrality of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to Heidegger's understanding of ontology in the late 1920s. Why does fundamental ontology become a specifically transcendental philosophy, and how ought we to understand the transcendental thread in relation to the wider systematics of Being and Time? Regarding the first question, I argue that Heidegger's thought undergoes its own 'Copernican Revolution' in response to a methodological aporia Heidegger is confronted with - namely, how can phenomenology address the question of the meaning of being whilst going beyond mere anthropology? The Copernican Revolution, I argue, signals a way out insofar as it demonstrates that intentional conditions coincide with ontological conditions - and with this in place, structures of Dasein are consequently structures of being. Secondly, in filling out Heidegger's transcendental conception of ontology, I draw an analogy between Kantian imagination and Heideggerian disclosedness as the root of their systematic unity - that what both philosophers foundationally recognise ontologically is a structure of ambiguity at the heart of the human subjectivity, between intuition and understanding, existentiality and facticity. Ontological interpretation, in turn, is structually projective for both Kant and Heidegger - which is to say, the formal structures of their respective ontologies cohere. Finally, I consider the question of transcendental idealism in relation to Kant and Heidegger, and set out how the primarily systematic argument that I provide in the thesis can provide the basis for closer readings of Being and Time.

The seminar will be followed by a Q&A session and drinks in The Duck.