A Sometimes Sympathetic Indictment. The Face-to-Face Confrontation between Husserlian Transcendental Phenomenology and Kant’s Transcendentalism

Abstract

This essay develops a comparison between Kant’s transcendental idealism and Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. The theme of the transcendental is at the centre of Husserl’s interest, who aims to highlight the teleological motif that emerges in the history of modern philosophy. In particular, it was shown how in the transition from static phenomenology to genetic-constitutive phenomenology Husserl’s detachment from Kant manifested itself with increasing clarity, through Husserl’s criticism of Kant’s method of transcendentalism, his theory of knowledge, the so-called revolutionary Copernican turn, the Kant’s doctrine of the faculties of the soul and presupposition of absolute things in themselves, which introduced psychologistic and anthropologistic aspects into Kant’s thought. The profound diversity that reigns between Kantian idealism and the peculiar form of idealism claimed by Husserl concerns, above all, the respective conception of experience and transcendental subjectivity, from which derives the Husserlian need to reformulate the field of transcendental aesthetics, privileging from the constitutive point of view the theme of embodiment and intersubjectivity.

Keywords: Achievement, Constitution, Experience, Phenomenology, Transcendental, Transcendentalism