Call for Papers

Special Issue: Kant’s Legacy in Transcendental Phenomenology

Guest Editor: Sara Rocca (Università di Pisa/Università degli studi di Firenze)

The aim of this special issue is to offer new perspectives on the multifaceted relationship between Kant and the phenomenological tradition. It seeks to explore how central Kantian concepts are reappropriated, displaced, or renewed within phenomenological frameworks, and how phenomenology has both depended on—and contributed to reshaping – differing interpretations of the critical project and some of its most complex theoretical cores. While phenomenologists – whether canonical figures such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, or less frequently discussed authors like Fink, Patočka, Henry, Ricœur, or Richir – inherited crucial Kantian notions, they also profoundly transformed them, often through mediations shaped by their debates with neo-Kantian interpreters of Kant.

The special issue welcomes contributions examining how Kantian notions such as reason, transcendental synthesis, the unity of apperception, schematism, imagination, and time as the form of inner sense can be reinterpreted within a phenomenological framework. Particular attention will be devoted to the status and transformation of the transcendental in phenomenology: its methodological redefinition, its genetic and temporal articulation, and its possible displacement toward embodied, affective, and intersubjective dimensions of experience. Within this broader horizon, Kant’s account of imagination and its relation to temporality constitutes a privileged site for examining how phenomenology rethinks Kant’s articulation of the faculties in light of its analyses of intentional constitution, the genesis of sense, and the multilayered structure of intentional life.

The special issue will build on the burgeoning debates of recent years, inviting contributions addressing, among others, issues revolving around the following axes of inquiry:

Metamorphoses of the transcendental. The fate of the Kantian transcendental framework and the bearings of its phenomenological reworking.

Continuity and rupture in the articulation of the faculties. Re-examinations of Kant’s distinction between sensibility, understanding, and imagination in light of phenomenological accounts of constitution and genesis.

Schematism, perception, and pre-predicative experience. The Kantian schema as a precursor to phenomenological accounts of pre-predicative intentional structures of perception, perceptual sense-formation, typification of experience, embodiment, as well as its implications for contemporary debates between conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations of Kant.

Temporality, synthesis, and the productivity of imagination. The viability and transformation of transcendental synthesis within phenomenological investigations of time-constitution, passive synthesis, genesis of sense, together with the role of productive and reproductive imagination in contemporary debates on perceptual presence and the perspectival character of perception.

Epistemological and ontological implications. The broader consequences of phenomenological reconfigurations of Kantian concepts for questions of objectivity, constitution, the status of the a priori, the regulative and systematic role of reason.

Practical and normative implications. The reception and reconfiguration of Kantian themes concerning practical and theoretical reason in phenomenological approaches to freedom, responsibility, intersubjectivity, and ethical or normative life.

Confirmed Contributors:

Lilian Alweiss (Trinity College Dublin)

Maxime Doyon (Université de Montréal)

Articles (Studi Kantiani accepts contributions in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish) should be sent to clr@unige.it by December 15th, 2026. They must be prepared for blind review, removing all self-identifying references, and include an abstract and five keywords (in English).

Papers should not exceed 60.000 characters (spaces, abstract, and keywords included).