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A Parting of the Ways is essential reading for anyone interested in 20th-century philosophy, the legacy of Kant, or the origins of the analytic-continental divide. It shows that the split was not a failure of communication but a deep philosophical fork in the road—one that we may still be in the process of understanding. If you are looking for a PDF of this book, please note that it is protected by copyright. You may be able to access it through an academic library (e.g., via JSTOR, Oxford Academic, or a university login) or purchase a legal copy from Oxford University Press. I cannot provide direct PDF links.
The third figure, Rudolf Carnap (logical positivist), was not present at Davos but responded sharply to Heidegger in his 1932 essay “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language.” Carnap famously mocked a sentence from Heidegger’s What Is Metaphysics? : “The Nothing itself nothings.” Using logical syntax, Carnap argued that such statements are not false but meaningless —they violate the logical rules of language. For Carnap, metaphysics was a symptom of emotional or poetic expression disguised as cognition. a parting of the ways carnap cassirer and heidegger pdf
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Michael Friedman’s A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (2000) is a landmark study in 20th-century philosophy. It focuses on the legendary 1929 disputation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland, and the subsequent, more famous, critique of Heidegger by Rudolf Carnap. Friedman argues that this moment represents a definitive “parting of the ways” in philosophy—the split between analytic and continental traditions—and traces its roots not to mere stylistic or political differences, but to deep, substantive disagreements about the nature of logic, the possibility of metaphysics, and the interpretation of Kant. A Parting of the Ways is essential reading
