"In March 1929, the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger met in Davos, Switzerland to debate the Kantian concepts of freedom and rationality. Their debate has come to have great significance as a point at which the divide between analytic and continental philosophy became established, and also, arguably, when the old order represented by Cassirer was forced to give way to a new one represented by Heidegger. In this book, the first detailed philosophical analysis of the debate itself, Simon Truwant shows how Cassirer's and Heidegger's disagreement about the meaning of Kant's philosophy was motivated by their different views about the human condition, which in turn were motivated by their opposing conceptions of what the task of philosophy should ultimately be. He shows that these two very different opponents share a grand philosophical concern: to comprehend and aid the human being's capacity to orient itself in and towards the world"--