Brewington, Brad

Senior, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Major: Philosophy

Minor: Sound Design

Thesis Director: Avery Goldman, Department of Philosophy

Faculty Advisor: William McNeill, Department of Philosophy

Bio: Brad is a senior Philosophy major with a minor in Sound Design, interested in Kant, Aesthetics and Critical Theory. When not reading philosophy or working on film projects he plays American primitivist folk guitar.

Abstract: Martin Heidegger’s 1929 interpretation of Kant in the book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is known for its supposed interpretive violence. One important aspect emphasized by both Heidegger and Kant is the role of human transcendence in experience; that our spontaneous faculties, for Kant— and our pre-conceptual understanding of Being, for Heidegger— always go ahead of our engagements with the world, to first delimit the region within which those engagements take place. In this way experience, as conceived by both thinkers, itself takes on an interpretive character. In this essay I examine the differences between this anticipating of experience in the thought of Kant and Heidegger, paying particular attention to the way they define the terms “Possibility” [Möglichkeit] and “Reality” [Realität] relative to the structure of this anticipating and their conception of subjectivity and what the differing nature of this anticipating of experience reveals about the aims, objects, and interpretive possibilities of their respective philosophies.