This thesis explores some key aspects of early Heidegger’s interpretations of Kant from a phenomenological perspective. In general terms, it analyzes Heidegger’s claim that Kant’s faculties share a common root in the transcendental imagination, as a critical development of motives found in Husserl’s phenomenology.

More precisely, the thesis argues that the motive for deriving Kant’s first faculty, intuition, from the synthesis of imagination can be understood as an attempt to account for the receptivity of a finite subject, without yielding to a causal description of sensibility. Phenomenology shares this problem with Kant’s critical philosophy. Concerning the claim that the second faculty, understanding, originates from the transcendental imagination, Heidegger connects it to his ambition of liberating Kant from a Cartesian heritage, where understanding is conceived as an independent faculty, disconnected from time and sensibility. The thesis explores this motive in relation to Husserl’s claim that the independent use of understanding in the forming of judgments and concepts –is derived from its function in the service of intuition. The belonging together of intuition and understanding is a core aspect of phenomenology, present from its breakthrough in Husserl’s Logical Investigations to his last writings in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. A general ambition of the thesis is, through a reading of Heidegger’s interpretations of Kant, to shed some light on this fact, and hopefully thereby – at least to some extent – to deepen our understanding of the phenomenological project as such.      

Although the thesis’ primary concern is not polemical, on some occasions it criticizes other interpreters of Heidegger’s relation to Kant for neglecting or wholly rejecting the phenomenological point of departure of Heidegger’s interpretations.