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This book asks how the literary works of the German writer Heinrich von Kleist might be considered a critique and elaboration of Kantian philosophy. In 1801, the 23-year-old Kleist, attributing his loss of confidence in our knowledge of the world to his reading of Kant, turned from science to literature. He ignored Kant's apology of the sciences to focus on the philosopher's doctrine of the unknowability of things in themselves. From that point on, Kleist's writings relate confrontations with points of hermeneutic resistance. Truth is no longer that which the sciences establish; only the disappointment of every interpretation attests to the continued sway of truth. Though he adheres to Kant's definition of Reason as the faculty that addresses things in themselves, Kleist sees no need for its critique and discipline in the name of the reasonableness (prudence and common sense) of the experience of the natural sciences. Setting transcendental Reason at odds with empirical reasonableness, he releases Kant's ethics and doctrine of the sublime from the moderating pull of their examples.

This book is a collection of chapters on Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences by philosophers of science and scholars of Husserl. Published and ignored under the Nazi dictatorship, Husserl's last work has never received the attention its author's prominence demands. In the Crisis, Husserl considers the gap that has grown between the “life-world” of everyday human experience and the world of mathematical science. He argues that the two have become disconnected because we misunderstand our own scientific past—we confuse mathematical idealities with concrete reality and thereby undermine the validity of our immediate experience. The philosopher's foundational work in the theory of intentionality is relevant to contemporary discussions of qualia, naïve science, and the fact–value distinction. The chapters included in this volume consider Husserl's diagnosis of this “crisis” and his proposed solution. Topics addressed include Husserl's late philosophy, the relation between scientific and everyday objects and “worlds,” the history of Greek and Galilean science, the philosophy of history, and Husserl's influence on Foucault.