Abstract

This dissertation looks at Heidegger's phenomenological interpretation of the notion of imagination in Kant's epistemology. Heidegger in his early works on Kant broadens Kant's meaning of imagination to mean something more than a cognitive or mental faculty engaged in the formation of intuition or the synthesis of sensible intuitions and conceptual categories for the sake of cognition. For Kant imagination's activity involves the formation or determination of time, so that concepts can be applied to temporal objects, thus enabling the cognition of an object. Heidegger broadens this time-forming activity of imagination to the ontological and precognitive, namely the openness or "transcendence" of human existence to the world. one's initial encounter with the world or with being occurs prior to the cognitive act, prior to the constitution of objects, prior to the objectification of being. This openness for Heidegger is ultimately founded upon the ontological condition of human temporality or mortality. It is through the horizon of time that being, for Heidegger, unfolds. By interpreting Kantian imagination in this way, Heidegger wants to confirm his own theory concerning being, that the sense or meaning of being is time. The purpose of this dissertation is to discern whether this reading of Kantian imagination makes sense even for a phenomenology of being. The broadening of the imagination beyond the cognitive to the ontological and its identification with Dasein's temporal opening to the world, are to be questioned. This will lead to the further questioning concerning Heidegger's prioritization of time over space, temporality over spatiality, in his discussions of being's unfolding. These issues will also be related to Heidegger's neglect of the imagination in his later works on Kant as well as his downplaying of it in some of his later writings, and his eventual move away from his earlier temporo-centrism