Branches of Philosophy Podcast · Philosophy Cognitive Science

[196] Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics By Martin Heidegger

·29 min·2 clips

Heidegger calls the schematism “the very ground for the inner possibility of ontological knowledge.”

This episode frames Heidegger's book as a challenge to Kant's usual reception. Early twentieth-century interpreters are treated as reading Kant mainly as an epistemologist, while Heidegger pushes the issue toward ontology and asks what makes knowledge of beings possible at all. That shifts the problem. Metaphysics is not presented as a structure simply waiting to be built, but as something rooted in a deeper human tendency that has to be uncovered. Time then takes over. Heidegger's argument gives time the role of a guiding essential element in pure knowledge and transcendence, since its universality helps explain how knowledge works at all. Space stays in view. It is not dismissed, but it is treated as secondary while the discussion follows Kant's pure intuition and Heidegger's effort to ground its ontological importance. The episode next turns to the understanding. Pure concepts are explained as the means by which particulars in intuition are determined under something general, and reflection is unpacked as gathering representations, comparing them, and abstracting a concept. Judgment matters here. Kant's pure concepts are presented as conditions for judgment itself, which makes the table of judgments feel like more than a neat classification. That table is questioned. The hosts note the debate over whether the categories can really be grounded from it alone, especially given Kant's revisions and his criticism of Aristotle. The tension is useful. If that grounding is shaky, then the table of judgments may be doing a different ontological job than a simple derivation story suggests. A second stage follows. Heidegger's reading moves toward the essential unity of pure knowledge, where intuition, understanding, and imagination have to be brought together rather than left as separate faculties. The pace stays brisk. The closing turn asks whether modern thought really meets the questions of finitude, knowledge, and reality that Kant and Heidegger keep pressing.

As heard by us

A clear, demanding look at Heidegger's deeper challenge to Kant.

Martin Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics shifts Kant away from a narrow theory-of-knowledge reading and toward metaphysics and ontology.

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Why you'd press play

You want Heidegger's reading of Kant made tractable without flattening the argument into a slogan.

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