As a significant event of the 20th century European thought, the debate of Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos has had a long-lasting impact on a number of disciplines and scholars. My investigations serve the aim of offering an access to various methodological layers of a famous debate and exploring whether this debate can contribute to re-think horizons beyond subjectivity. This problematics is inseparable from the recognition of a new reading of Kant, of human (in)finitude and of Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s two alternative approaches to hermeneutics. First, I offer some basic philological and historical considerations with regard to the development of a better understanding of this debate. Furthermore, I explore the Davos dispute itself as a hermeneutic-phenomenological event, concentrating on its own context and reconstructing the human condition, i. e. Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s return to the single, and main question “What is to be a human being?”. Finally, I propose to assess what may be regarded as the main characteristic of these two eminent thinkers’ dispute and a sense of this debate for philosophy and intellectual history. [*]
[*] This paper is an enlarged version of my lecture at the “Questioning Subjectivity” international conference organized by Jan Patocka’s Archives and the Charles University, Prague (Czech Republic) September 16–17, 2013. I used the text of my lecture held at the “Debating Philosophers: Disputations and Controversies” conference, organized by the MTA–ELTE Hermeneutics Research Group and the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (Hungary), May 16–17, 2013. My paper was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (BO/00053/13/2) and by the Research Support Office of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the frame of MTA–ELTE Hermeneutics Research Group.
