The Conclusion locates Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant among contemporary Anglophone interpretations. The author shows that Heidegger’s interpretation is legible within the broader landscape of Anglophone Kant scholarship by charting its position on Kant’s metaphysics, discursivity, conceptualism, idealism, and historicism. It is concluded that Heidegger offers us a live option for interpreting Kant.

Along with the third chapter, this chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant is informed by the successes and failures of previous interpretations. Heidegger does not bring idiosyncratic concerns to Kant’s text, but rather carries forward an interpretive tradition that began with the German Idealists and continued with the Marburg Neo-Kantians: a tradition that attempted to unify Kant’s dual faculties of sensibility and understanding, and to therefore ground the metaphysical principles that depend on their unification. The Neo-Kantians unify the faculties by insisting that human cognition is understanding through and through; Kant was wrong to think we have a separate faculty of sensibility. This interpretation erases the signature discursivity of Kant’s position, the idea that two qualitatively different faculties are required for us to cognize. This chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation does not have this result, even though it prioritizes the faculty of imagination. Heidegger’s central thesis in his Kant book – that, on the best version of Kant’s argument, the imagination has priority as the source of cognition – rests crucially on the claim that the imagination is both receptive and spontaneous. Thus, Heidegger’s interpretation maintains Kant’s discursivity thesis, while inquiring more deeply into the unified receptivity and spontaneity that characterizes the human being.

Chapter 1 argues that Heidegger, like many reconstructive interpreters, takes up the main question posed by the first Critique and attempts to identify Kant’s most plausible line of response to it, consulting the claims in Kant’s text alongside Heidegger’s own beliefs. Because Heidegger seeks to attribute true claims to Kant, his method of interpretation resembles that of Davidson and Gadamer. However, Heidegger improves on their method, because he recognizes the methodological role of disagreement in coming to agree with some author, thereby making room for differences in view between interpreter and text. He argues that we should expect great thinkers to struggle with their subject matter, offering competing strands of argument as they attempt to work out their view. The interpreter, therefore, must isolate the most promising strand of argument, differentiating it from less compelling arguments. Accordingly, Heidegger offers a two-strand interpretation of Kant that differentiates an insightful line of argumentation prioritizing imagination from a less promising line prioritizing understanding. Further, Heidegger offers a theory of error explaining why Kant struggles with his subject matter: Kant retreats to his less compelling argument due to the anxiety he experiences in uncovering the fundamental structure of the human being.

I officially embarked on the research that would one day become this book in June 2013, when I defended a prospectus promising a dissertation on the topic of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation. Not one year later, in March 2014, selections from Heidegger’s so-called Black Notebooks were published in his Gesamtausgabe. This material confirmed that Heidegger’s philosophy could not be insulated from his Nazism and, indeed, from the anti-Semitism that he expressed in those volumes using his own philosophical vocabulary.

The Introduction provides a basic account of Heidegger’s method of interpreting Kant, and the major philosophical themes that feature in his interpretation. These themes include fundamental ontology, human finitude, receptivity, and time. The Introduction also introduces the main sources under consideration: Heidegger’s 1927–1928 lecture series on Kant, and his 1929 Kant book. Finally, an overview of the chapters in the book is provided.

This chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction and Schematism. In Heidegger’s view, these two sections inquire into the source of the categories that human understanding possesses a priori. Heidegger’s reading of both sections exhibits a characteristic move of his interpretive method, where he sees an innovative line of argument prioritizing the imagination emerge from a more traditional setup. The reconstruction also reveals some variety in how one can apply Heidegger’s interpretive method to the different parts of a text. Heidegger suggests that the traditional strand of argument is more prominent in the Metaphysical Deduction; while Kant attempts to derive the categories from the atemporal logic of the understanding, his references to the faculty of imagination at certain critical junctures reveal the breakdown of those attempts. By contrast, the emerging, innovative line of argument is more prominent in the Schematism, which quickly surpasses its traditional framing in order to offer a phenomenologically compelling account of how the categories, as ways of interpreting time (as constant, unidirectional, and so forth), inform our perceptual experience.

This chapter compares Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant with that of the German Idealists. The German Idealists attempt to unify Kant’s faculty psychology by uncovering a “common root” that is the source of sensibility and understanding, where the common root is a homogenous capacity that nevertheless can generate the other faculties. Insofar as these interpretations rely on telling a causal story, where one faculty causes others to arise, they return to a pre-critical position that Kant would reject; on Kant’s critical philosophy, we are precluded from extending categories like causality to our faculties for cognition, since such faculties do not appear sensibly in our experience. The chapter argues that, while Heidegger also seeks a common root, he avoids this problem by insisting that the common root is heterogenous. His common root – the imagination – is a unification of three basic capacities, rather than a single, deeper capacity that causes the others. Thus, Heidegger does not seek a foundation for metaphysics that is beyond the bounds of what Kant thinks we can know; he works with the cognitive capacities that Kant already identifies, but seeks to explain more fully the structural interrelationships between those capacities.

This chapter explores a significant thesis that emerges in Heidegger’s reading of Kant: the linear, unidirectional form of time that Kant outlines is dependent on another model of time – the human temporality comprising three interlaced temporal capacities. The chapter argues that developing this thesis represents the central philosophical payoff of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation; Heidegger goes to Kant to develop his own account of temporal idealism. Heidegger concurs with Kant that the form of time is relative to the human standpoint, but offers a deeper account of where that form of time comes from – i.e., how it derives from the very structure of the human being. While Being and Time attempts to trace the characteristics of linear time back to the human being’s temporality, Heidegger’s account of time in the Kant interpretation elaborates how temporality produces linear time. Specifically, Heidegger outlines the process of self-affection, in which the interaction between the human being’s three temporal capacities actualizes another model of time by interpreting the time that we ourselves are. This argumentative approach foregrounds a gap between the temporality of the human being and the interpretation of time upon which we arrive, suggesting that time could be otherwise interpreted.

This chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s interpretation of the Transcendental Deduction and addresses the common objection that Heidegger’s interpretation cherry-picks evidence from Kant’s text, failing to address counterevidence adequately. The chapter argues that Heidegger both acknowledges and addresses the counterevidence cited by his critics. Specifically, Heidegger identifies that counterevidence as a component of a traditional strand of argument that is less compelling than other, more radical ideas in Kant’s text. On the traditional strand of argument, Kant attempts to spell out the a priori contact between sensibility and understanding by identifying a form of atemporal self-consciousness, apperception, that uses concepts to actively unify our sense experience. Heidegger is critical of this strand of argument because it remains unclear how apperception, construed as atemporal, can be unified with our temporal sense experience. How do two unlike things come together – time and not-time? Heidegger argues that one arrives at a more convincing account by developing the temporal dimension of apperception, where it holds up expectations for the future. This development helps one appreciate the deeper unity of our passive sensing of the present and our active anticipation of the future – a unity grounded in the temporal structure of the imagination, three interlaced temporal capacities that characterize the human being.

Certainty is the “truth” of entities in modernity. Heidegger primarily discusses certainty in connection to Descartes, who used certainty as the criterion of truth in his philosophy: that which we can be certain. Heidegger discusses Cartesian certainty both as a foil for his early thought, and as an essential moment in the history of metaphysics emphasized in his later thought.

“Stand”’ connotes stable presence, and is the root word and the core notion in a family of related concepts that Heidegger draws on frequently. The word is central to Heidegger’s discussion of the history of metaphysics, often incorporated into the term denoting an epoch’s understanding of what it means, in very general terms, to be an entity.

Apperception is the ability to identify a stable domain of objects in reference to a stable (i.e., temporally extended) sense of self. Heidegger borrows the term “apperception” from Husserl and Kant (who borrowed it, in turn, from Leibniz). Heidegger’s use of this term sheds light on his interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, his interpretive disagreements with the neo-Kantians, and his own criticism of Kant’s account of the self.