ABSTRACT

Among 20th-century philosophers, it is arguably Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, in their contrasting phenomenological efforts (transcendental for Husserl, ontological for Heidegger), who most substantially and influentially engaged time's constitutive paradoxes in their questioning, thus making of their efforts a still unequalled thinking of time in its essential bearing for human existence. Towards this end, Husserl deploys the method of epoche and transcendental reduction to recover the constitutive functioning of inner time-consciousness within experience. This analysis takes the parallel form of an archaeology of the structuring of time-consciousness and a genealogy of structured experiences in time-consciousness. In an ingenious turn of argument, Heidegger re-casts the image of temporality as the standing-streaming of consciousness into an existential manner in which Dasein has left itself behind in its own temporal self-manifestation as present to the world. An analysis of Dasein’s original temporality – the temporalization that Dasein “is” – promises to uncover the ground.