This essay reveals the destructive possibility inherent in the deformalization of the Kantian notion of time governing Levinas' engagement with Rosenzweig. It demonstrates that this programme of deformalization not only retains Rosenzweig's idea that the abstract aspects of time can be deformalized, and thus grounded concretely, in the biblical events of temporality, but also moves toward an ethical destruction of the schematism understood as an exposition of the temporality of the Other which can be distinguished essentially as a threefold grounding (...) of time in the Kantian sense. This unique connection between the temporality of the Other and this ethical destruction of the schematism is then developed according to the ontological destruction of the schematism in Heidegger's exposition of the problematic of temporality on the one hand, and to the repetition or renewal of this temporal problematic of the schematism in Levinas' deformalization of the Kantian notion of time on the other. The essay concludes.. (shrink)

The book offers an ethical interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason by establishing the historical connection between the problematic of Temporality in the philosophies of Heidegger and Levinas on the one hand, and the ground-laying of metaphysics in the schematism of Kant's critical philosophy on the other. Drawing on Levinas' ethical critique of the Heideggerian problematic of Temporality together with his destructive proposal to carry out the deformalization of the Kantian notion of time in a manner consistent with Rosenzweig's (...) philosophy, the book argues that this historical connection should be established at the point where Kant determines the ethical status of the schematism according to the regulative schemas of the ideas of pure reason, and not, as in Heidegger's ontological destruction, at the point of his determination of the sensible schemas of the pure concepts of understanding alone. (shrink)