Transcendental Idealism and Metaphysics

The book offers a systematic reconstruction of the disagreement between Husserl and Heidegger from the former's point of view, but without falling into any form of Husserlian apologetics. The main thesis is that Husserl's critique of Heidegger's existential analytics as a form of philosophical anthropology entails a deeper fundamental thesis, namely, that Heidegger confuses the subject matter of first philosophy (the transcendental subject) with metaphysics (in the Husserlian sense of the expression). At stake in Husserl's critique of Heidegger's philosophy in Being and Time is the refusal to transcendentalize the irrational aspects of our human existence. This second volume focuses on the question of being, clarifying the distinction between ontology and metaphysics in Husserl's thought. In fact, contrary to a long-standing and established interpretive tradition, according to which Husserl's phenomenology is metaphysically neutral, the book shows to what extent Husserl always understood as the ultimate goal of his philosophizing the positive foundation of a metaphysics. This volume appeals to students and researchers.

Daniele De Santis (1983) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies (ÚFAR) of Charles University, Prague. He works mainly on the history of early phenomenology (Husserl, Stein, Hering, Heidegger, Beck) and the history of philosophy (Plato, history of Platonism, Kant, Lotze). He is the editor in-chief of The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (Routledge); he has recently published the monograph Husserl and the A Priori. Phenomenology and Rationality (Springer 2022); and the collective volumes: The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (Routledge 2021) and Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology: Encounters, Intersections, Oppositions (Ohio University Press 2022).