A Tale of Two Faculties: Heidegger's Method of Interpreting Kant

Abstract

Against the consensus that Heidegger reads his own philosophical views into Kant, I argue that Heidegger takes up the main question posed by the first Critique and attempts to identify Kant's best answer to it. Heidegger's method resembles those of Gadamer and Davidson. But by reading the first Critique as offering two conflicting strands of argument, he abandons their aim of maximizing truth, and his theory of error explains why Kant offers the less-promising strand. Heidegger thus provides a distinctive model of charitable, reconstructive interpretation that avoids hermeneutic ventriloquism—a failure to recognize differences of view between interpreter and text.