Abstract

The concept of a priori plays an important role in Kant’s entiree philosophy. However, Husserl often claimed that a genuine concept of a priori in the phenomenological sense was absent in Kant. Scheler criticized this concept of Kant just as Husserl did. All of Scheler’s ethical critiques of Kant, who is the major opponent to Scheler, are based on his critiques of Kant’s concept of a priori because, for Scheler, it is the largest absurdity of Kant’s theory that a priori is equated to the formal. Scheler thus clearly delineated Kant’s transcendentalism, which seeks a priori in form. It seems that Scheler‘s comprehension and interpretation of a priori reversed Kant’s “Copernican revolution”, in contrast with which, Scheler carried ou a „Ptolemiac counter-revolution“. In fact, Scheler questioned Kant‘s transcendental-rational theory of the function of synthetic categories, which derived from the “Copernican revolution”. Nevertheless, Scheler did not want to defend the pre-Kant position, or Kant’s pre-critique period. He also did not mean simply to stress one side in Kant’s dualism, which was ignored by Kant. In fact, he wanted to question Kant’s metaphysical dualism itself. The eventual goal of his phenomenological philosophy is to reveal the uncritical presuppositions in Kant’s critical philosophy.