Husserl’s interpretation of Kant’s transcendental Aesthetic stands out as one of the most pivotal moments in his engagement with Kant’s philosophy. Accordingly, numerous contributions in Husserlian scholarship have examined in detail how Husserl develops his own phenomenological transcendental Aesthetic in contrast to Kant’s. However, in certain passages, Husserl also suggests that the transcendental Aesthetic presented as the first part of the Elementarlehre is not the only Aesthetic to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason. This article takes up that suggestion and argues that Husserl reinterprets Kant’s transcendental Aesthetic in light of his phenomenological appropriation of the deduction of the categories in the first edition of the Critique, the so-called “A-Deduction.” First, I examine the two “discoveries” Husserl attributes to Kant: the idea of a synthesis “structured in levels” and the phenomenological distinction between the transcendental Aesthetic and the transcendental Analytic. I argue that, for Husserl, the latter discovery is possible only on the basis of the former. Second, I show that by a synthesis structured in levels, Husserl refers to Kant’s threefold synthesis in the A-Deduction. With the help of Husserl’s marginalia in his copy of the first Critique, I then illustrate how he phenomenologically interprets the three moments of this synthesis as constitutive of the spatio-temporal form of the sensible object.

McDowell shares with phenomenology the idea that experience is open to the world and that the relation between mind and world is normative. While he claims that conceptual capacities are already passively involved in experience, passive synthesis in Husserl has its own intentional constitution, which originally has a rational and normative character in a primitive sense, yet doesn’t depend on conceptual and linguistic capacities. In my analysis, McDowell’s notion of conceptual capacities enables the formation of experience in two ways: by providing conceptual content, and by building up awareness that is later linked with self-critical reflection. I argue that in Husserl’s phenomenology, experience already has structural content without relying on concepts and that attention already displays a pre-reflective exercise of rationality without relying on self-critical reflection. Husserl’s rationality is not to be linked with conceptual capacities, reflection, or spontaneity. Moreover, Husserl’s notion of experience is broader than McDowell’s. McDowell denies that some second nature could count as conceptualized experience, since it is accomplished without explicit awareness. In contrast, Husserl would admit the rationality of second nature even though it lies beneath attentive awareness at the level of receptivity, because there is a deeper pre-reflective, affective participation of the I in the passive motivation that contributes to the horizonality of experience in an implicit mode. Thus rationality and normativity penetrate more deeply into second nature than McDowell thinks. In comparison to McDowell, Husserl shows how a notion of rationality in a much broader sense is involved in experience.

In this short study, I attempt to reconstruct the main conceptual components of Edmund Husserl’s concept of death following the leading clue of his late transcendental phenomenological methodology. First, I summarise his thoughts on death, from the point of view of “the natural attitude”, as an event in the world. Then, I try and explore the manifold senses of the limit phenomenon of death as a multidimensional transcendental phenomenological problem in all of its intersubjective-world constitutive, personal-primordial, and metaphysical-constructive layers of meanings, respectively. By doing so, I also hope that the path we travel can serve the reader as an opportunity for a personal and reflective confrontation with death.