Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 22, Number I, 2000 Review Essay: Phenomenology in Kant's Idealism: Pierre Kerszberg's Critique and Totality Miguel Vatter 1. On Reading Kant Phenomenologically Pierre Kerszberg's Critique and Totality is one of the boldest and most intriguing phenomenological readings of the Kantian critical pro- ject to date. The gambit of the book is that phenomenology can unlock the authentic sense of Kantian critique only on the condition that it, in turn, does not lose sight of the critical standpoint. The book is an invi- tation to consider phenomenology and (transcendental) idealism as compatible and mutually enabling doctrines, while it also lays bare, indirectly, the tensions between them. Since the current alternatives to analytical philosophy of language draw mostly from one or both of these doctrines, this book offers an important contribution to the debate on the origins and trajectories of contemporary continental phi- losophy out of the Kantian revolution. Infinitely contestable, the meaning of Kant's transcendental ideal- ism nonetheless finds a point de capiton in the idea that knowledge of objects is possible only insofar as these objects appear, and that appear- ances find their condition of possibility in the pure intuitions of space and time as subjective forms of sensibility. Kant often expresses the transcendental ideality of space and time in terms of the limitation of human cognition to appearances and not to things in themselves. But the 'loss' of the thing-in-itself as object of possible cognition is quickly made up because it enables the famous 'Copernican revolution' in thinking, the thought-experiment whose primary hypothesis is that the conditions of possible objects are the conditions of possible knowledge of objects rather than the other way around. Since the experiment calls 303