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"In March 1929, the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger met in Davos, Switzerland to debate the Kantian concepts of freedom and rationality. Their debate has come to have great significance as a point at which the divide between analytic and continental philosophy became established, and also, arguably, when the old order represented by Cassirer was forced to give way to a new one represented by Heidegger. In this book, the first detailed philosophical analysis of the debate itself, Simon Truwant shows how Cassirer's and Heidegger's disagreement about the meaning of Kant's philosophy was motivated by their different views about the human condition, which in turn were motivated by their opposing conceptions of what the task of philosophy should ultimately be. He shows that these two very different opponents share a grand philosophical concern: to comprehend and aid the human being's capacity to orient itself in and towards the world"--
List of contents
Introduction: what is at stake in the Davos debate?; 1. Reconstructing the Davos debate; Part I. The Lasting Meaning of Kant's Thoughts: 2. Cassirer's transformation of the critique of reason into a critique of culture; 3. Heidegger's reading of transcendental philosophy as phenomenological ontology; 4. Receptivity or spontaneity: two readings of the Critique of Pure Reason; Part II. 'What Is the Human Being?': 5. Cassirer's functional account of the 'animal symbolicum'; 6. Heidegger's existential analytic of 'Dasein'; 7. Infinity and finitude: the quest for existential orientation; Part III. The Task of Philosophy: 8. Cassirer's functional conception of philosophy; 9. Heidegger's hermeneutic conception of philosophy; 10. Enlightenment or therapy: the cosmopolitan task of philosophy; Conclusion: the terminus a quo and terminus ad quem of the Davos debate.
About the author
Simon Truwant is FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at KU Leuven. He is the editor of Interpreting Cassirer: Critical Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and has published articles in journals including Epoché, Idealistic Studies, and International Journal of Philosophical Studies.
Summary
The 1929 debate between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in Davos is considered one of the most important intellectual debates of the twentieth century and a founding moment of continental philosophy. This is the first comprehensive philosophical analysis of the content and arguments of this fascinating and often misunderstood debate.
