Kant's Experiment of Pure Reason and Hermeneutical Phenomenology

Abstract

In this paper I discuss some similarities between the experimentalism of Kant's critical philosophy and the empiricism of Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology. I argue that in hermeneutical phenomenology the decisive criterion for accepting a proposed conceptualization of the 'meaning and ground' of the phenomenal findings cannot be the phenomenal conformity of the hermeneutical synthesis or phenomenological construction to the manifold phenomenal findings about the beings of an entity, any entity, or of being as such. Rather, what decides in favor of a proposed conceptualization, such as the conceptualization of human existence in terms of care and, ultimately, of ecstatic temporality, is the experimentally established transparency of the disclosive understanding of being, just as in the case of Kant's critical philosophy it was the experimentally established harmony of reason with itself-despite all the apodictic, ostensive, and direct demonstrations both in the Critique of Pure Reason and in Being and Time.