The 1929 Davos disputation revisited

The 1929 disputation at Davos, Switzerland, pitting Martin Heidegger's version of phenomenology against Cassirer's extension of neo-Kantianism, initiated a shift in Western philosophy from epistemology to ontology. Although most agree that Heidegger won, few agree about what was at issue. My dissertation seeks to clarify the protocol with references to related topics in the published works of both philosophers. It also attempts to bring out differences that the insufficient sharpness of the disputation, which Heidegger attributed to Cassirer's politeness, served to conceal. By following phenomenological clues within the disputation, I trace the underlying conflict to Cassirer's and Heidegger's differing interpretations of Kant. At the core of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant describes the transcendental structure, consisting of sense, imagination, and apperception, by which human beings relate to objects on both the a priori and a posteriori levels. Cassirer appropriates the empirical, conscious level of this Kantian structure as the backbone of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, yielding a three-stage historical unfolding toward timeless objectivity of the various cultural spheres: language, myth, religion, and science. Heidegger, in contrast, beginning with Phenomenology of Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' (1927/8), appropriates this same Kantian structure (along with others) ontologically on the a priori level as a transcendental description of Dasein's transcendence as being-in-the-world. I show the consequences at Davos of Heidegger's ontologically different reading of Kant, which undermines the conscious orientation not only of Cassirer, neo-Kantianism, and Husserlian phenomenology, but the tradition back to Plato. My dissertation shows how Heidegger's entire middle period, between the collapse of Being and Time through Beitrage , is shaped by his ontological appropriation of Kant. After Davos, Heidegger continues this project of reinterpreting Kant not only in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1927) and What is a Thing? (1936), but in his lectures on Leibniz, human freedom, truth, Hegel, and Schelling, By reclaiming through this effort the directly grasped being and temporality of truth from neo-Kantian subjective constructions, Heidegger lays the ground for his "so-called turn" later in the 1930s.