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Husserl's lifelong interest in Kant eventually becomes a preoccupation in his later years when he finds his phenomenology in competition with Neokantianism for the title of transcendental philosophy. Some issues that Husserl is concerned with in Kant are bound up with the works of Lambert. Kant believed that the role played by principles of sensibility in metaphysics should be determined by a "general phenomenology" on which Lambert had written. Kant initially believed that man is capable only of symbolic cognition, not intellectual intuition. Lambert saw an increasing need in mathematics for symbolic cognition as exemplified in his proofs of the irrationality of π and e. Kant takes from Leibniz and Lambert an unrestricted notion of construction, allowing him to view mathematics as constructing its concepts in intuition, while Lambert's proofs convince him that all mathematical problems are eventually solvable. Husserl criticizes Kant's intuitionism for its inadequate accommodation of meaning to intuition, which he redresses with his theory of categorial intuition. This may improve on Kant's intuition of the axiom of parallels but not so clearly on his spatial intuition. Husserl opposes Kant's view of space as the form of outer intuition with his own view of it as the form of things. Husserl's exploration of the geometry of visual space, which involves his earliest uses of epoché and reduction, converges however with Hilbert's logical analysis of Kantian spatial intuition in leading to Euclidean spatial judgments. Hilbert's analysis leads him to affirm the solvability of all well posed mathematical problems, a thesis complicated by the outbreak of logical paradoxes. Untroubled by such paradoxes, Husserl develops a supramathematics of all possible deductive systems whose completeness implicitly would also provide solutions of all such problems. Husserl's full transcendental turn coincides with his realization that in effecting his Copernican turn, Kant was really the first to detect the "secret longing" of modern philosophy for a phenomenological clarification of being. Husserl now finds that Kant's transcendental deductions presuppose a pure ego not adequately analyzed by Kant that survives the phenomenological reduction. Husserl's idealism leads him to develop his own intuitionism, which adds to Kant's, a "method of clarification" of mathematical concepts intended to clarify difficult impossibility proofs, but neither Husserl nor Kant base arithmetic on time. Husserl's critique of the room left in Kant's idealism, for things in themselves, leads to his own monadological solution of the problem of intersubjectivity. Husserl's final judgment on Kant is that his form of transcendental idealism did not enable him to achieve absolute subjectivity through a genuine transcendental reduction.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-024-1132-4_2

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