The debate between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos, though relatively short, turns out to be wide-ranging one. As the debate progresses it seems less and less clear that there is a common language between the two disputants, making it hard to identify the exact point of contention between them. Nevertheless, I think there is on both sides, though perhaps more on Cassirer's, an attempt to find some common ground, if only to make the differences between them clearer. In the course of the debate Heidegger takes up a distinction Cassirer introduces early on between the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quern of their respective philosophical positions. In what follows, I want to explore this notion of the two termini as a guide to thinking about the criticisms raised by each side in the debate. But as well I will argue that it leads us to see a certain commonality in their conception of the task of a transcendental philosophy, one that gives weight to the multiplicity and autonomy of factical forms of life and objective spirit, even at the price of a certain systematicity. First, a clarification of the terms. In the first place the notion of two termini is used by Cassirer to designate the two ends of the process of constitution, the constituted as the endpoint of the process, and the constituting subject as its point of origin. But the figure of the two termini also doubles for him as a way of characterizing the distinctively neo-Kantian conception of transcendental research as a reconstruction of this process of constitution. Transcendental research is a Copernican turn by which we turn back from the constituted to its conditions of possibility in the constituting subject, thus a return from the terminus ad quern to the terminus a quo. Early in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms we find Cassirer using this distinction to characterize Natorp's psychology. Describing the problem that the object of psychology is no ordinary object, that "We can never lay bare the immediate life and being of consciousness as such,"1 Cassirer characterizes Natorp's approach to study of consciousness as one that explores the "unhalting process of objectivization in a twofold direction: from terminus a quo to terminus ad quern and back again." "In Natorp's opinion," Cassirer continues, "it is only by a continuous back and forth, by this twofold direction of method that the object of psychology can be made visible as such. It comes to light only when a new reconstructive effort is opposed to the constructive effort of mathematics and natural science, and of ethics and aesthetics as well."2 For Cassirer, then, the two termini signify the key neo-Kantian methodological stricture that consciousness can only be reconstructed as the formal transcendental conditions of the constituted objective world, and cannot be directly studied through any form of intuitive self-consciousness. But note also the emphasis on the idea of transcendental philosophy as an ongoing back and forth between the two termini, rather than a one-way ticket from constituted to constituting. This implies that a turn back to the factical, to the realm of the constituted in it's factical and historical multiplicity, provides a critical check on the success of the initial transcendental turn from the constituted to the constituting. At the Davos debate, Cassirer uses the contrast between the two termini in a similar fashion to characterize the contested place of the schematism in Kant's thought. Agreeing with Heidegger on the importance of the schematism to Kant's analysis of theoretical knowledge, he points out that Kant nevertheless forbids the schematism in the ethical sphere, saying, "For Kant, the Schematism is . . . the terminus a quo, but not the terminus ad quern."3 Cassirer's criticism, then, is that Heidegger has overlooked the terminus ad quern of Kant's philosophy: the sphere of the infinite, the sphere of an objectivity that one finds in Kant's understanding of the theoretical, the ethical, and the aesthetic. …