ABSTRACT
The immediate theme of the following analyses will be the position and characterization given to the imagination in the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger. The aim of the investigation is to show the sense of phenomenology in light of the treatment of imagination by each thinker. In the first part, detailed consideration will reveal that Husserl’s concept of imagination and the role it is accorded within the ‘economy’ of conscious life is far from univocal. In order to account for this equivocal sense of the imagination Husserl’s thought will be grasped as a sustained attempt to break down the concept/intuition dichotomy that underpins Kantian epistemology.1 Accordingly, the supposition underlying the approach adopted here is that Husserl’s sense of phenomenology, although certainly not assimilable to contemporary neoKantianism,2 is articulated within a broadly conceived Kantian conceptual terrain. In this way discussion of the role of imagination in phenomenology can be entered into within recognized parameters, something that is of the first importance when dealing with a notion as protean as the imagination.
