Francesco Scagliusi

Husserl’s interpretation of Kant’s transcendental Aesthetic stands out as one of the most pivotal moments in his engagement with Kant’s philosophy. Accordingly, numerous contributions in Husserlian scholarship have examined in detail how Husserl develops his own phenomenological transcendental Aesthetic in contrast to Kant’s. However, in certain passages, Husserl also suggests that the transcendental Aesthetic presented as the first part of the Elementarlehre is not the only Aesthetic to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason. This article takes up that suggestion and argues that Husserl reinterprets Kant’s transcendental Aesthetic in light of his phenomenological appropriation of the deduction of the categories in the first edition of the Critique, the so-called “A-Deduction.” First, I examine the two “discoveries” Husserl attributes to Kant: the idea of a synthesis “structured in levels” and the phenomenological distinction between the transcendental Aesthetic and the transcendental Analytic. I argue that, for Husserl, the latter discovery is possible only on the basis of the former. Second, I show that by a synthesis structured in levels, Husserl refers to Kant’s threefold synthesis in the A-Deduction. With the help of Husserl’s marginalia in his copy of the first Critique, I then illustrate how he phenomenologically interprets the three moments of this synthesis as constitutive of the spatio-temporal form of the sensible object.

This article argues that Heidegger’s appropriation of Husserl’s categorial intuition is essential for his interpretation of Kant’s concepts of intuition and form of intuition. First, I analyze the two aspects of Heidegger’s interpretation of Husserl’s categorial intuition that are relevant to his reading of Kant, namely, his understanding of categorial intuition as fundamentally intertwined with sensible intuition and his understanding of the correlate of such an intuiting as already unthematically coapprehended in sensible intuition. Second, I show that Heidegger incorporates these two aspects into his reading of Kant’s concept of intuition as a “thinking intuition” and into his interpretation of the Kantian “form of intuition” as something unthematically intuited in every experience.

This article argues that Husserl’s interpretation of Kant’s “regressive method” was influenced by Cohen’s account of the “transcendental method.” According to Cohen’s epistemological reading of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s transcendental method consists in explaining the “fact of science” by using a regressive procedure from this fact to its conditions of possibility. Husserl ascribes, as Cohen does, this method to Kant himself. First, he criticizes Kant for regressively deducing conditions of possibility that elude any type of intuitive fulfillment. Second, he understands Kant as a rationalist who wanted to advance intellectualism and oppose empiricism. Finally, Husserl holds that Kant’s concept of experience refers to scientific experience. All these points are central aspects of Cohen’s interpretation. Moreover, from Husserl’s own copy of Cohen’s Kant’s Theory of Experience we can observe that he had read §12 on Kant’s transcendental method. Therefore, there is a Cohenian influence on Husserl’s criticism of Kant’s method.

Although Paragraph 7 of Being and Time is one of the most comment­ed-on paragraphs of Heidegger’s main work, an extensive interpretation of the notion of “semblance” (Schein) has been neglected by most of the literature. Most studies merely note that Schein represents a contingent way of covering-up a phenomenon. However, in this paragraph, Heidegger explicitly distinguishes between contingent and necessary coverings-up. In the present paper, I argue that this difference between contingent and necessary coverings-up received a more extensive analysis in the Marburg lecture courses—especially in GA 17, GA 19, and GA 20—and that this distinction is crucial for understanding Heidegger’s phenomenological description of being. In particular, the paper illustrates that the possibility of a contingent covering-up corresponds to Heidegger’s treatment of the ψεῦδος in GA 17, while Heidegger develops the possibility of a necessary covering-up in his discussions of ἕτερον in GA 19 and Husserl’s “categorial intuition” in GA 20. Thus, I argue that Schein, as a necessary covering-up, is Heidegger’s phenomenological way of understanding being. Being is not something metaphysically hidden behind the phenomenon, but rather shows itself phenomenologically in every entity as its unthematically apprehended condition of possibility.