Cassirer and Heidegger on Kant's Legacy
by Jonathan Arriola " Thinking only begins when we have learned that the venerable faculty of reason is the most stubborn adversary of thought . " Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (1950) 1. Naphtha and Settembrini: The Philosophical Significance of a Meeting In 1929, the "Neokantian" philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the "existentialist" philosopher Martin Heidegger met in Davos, Switzerland to contrast two different readings of Kant's thoughts. Since its announcement, the dispute was marked by strong symbolism, as the two authors embodied "different epochs," as described by the Frankfurter Zeitung (Krois 1983, 147). On the one hand, there was the revered "giant" of the Marburg School, liberal rationalism, and political humanism, author of the recognized The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929) and defender of the Weimar Republic - and on the other, the young "promise" of a "revolutionary philosophy,...