Heidegger’s Reading of Transcendental Philosophy as Phenomenological Ontology

Though a core of the original Scholastic sense of “transcendental” arguably remains intact— all in its association with universal ontology and the apriori—the meaning of the term nevertheless undergoes a fundamental transformation in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Yet even in the wake of the critique, Martin Heidegger's project of fundamental ontology, grounded in an analytic of Dasein, however distant it may otherwise be from the transcendental subjectivity of either Edmund Husserl or Kant, nevertheless remains decidedly "transcendental" in character. The broad acceptance of these critiques, such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego, led many phenomenologists to avoid the term altogether. The “phenomenological ontology” expounded in Sartre, likewise the phenomenology of the Maurice Merleau-Ponty, keep transcendental philosophy at arm’s length, and Jan Patocka’s project of an “asubjective phenomenology” attempts explicitly to re-articulate the basic gestures of phenomenological philosophy in a precisely non-transcendental mode.