Charles M. Sherover’s Heidegger, Kant & Time is a demanding and deeply meditative work that refuses to treat philosophy as a succession of historical curiosities or as a series of doctrines to be cited and forgotten. Instead, it stages what the Greeks once understood as the essential task of memory: not the hoarding of past items like an accountant’s ledger, but the enlivening recollection in which the past becomes present, speaks anew, and opens the horizon of genuine creation. Just as the muses of old drew their power from Mnemosyne, philosophy here is seen as possible only when it remembers and retrieves its own beginnings, when it wrests from tradition the still-vital questions hidden in its depths. Sherover insists that only such a dialogue between past and present can restore philosophy to relevance in an age increasingly afflicted by forgetfulness, in which history is reduced to disposable fragments and intellectual inquiry risks being consumed by the immediacy of journal articles and ephemeral disputes.
The book situates Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant as precisely such an act of memory. Heidegger reads the Critique of Pure Reason not as a museum-piece of epistemology but as a still-unfolding attempt at grounding metaphysics in human finitude, temporality, and the imaginative power through which experience is synthesized. For Heidegger, Kant’s critical philosophy is decisive not because it systematized knowledge but because it exposed the horizon within which knowledge and being alike are possible: time. Kant, in declaring time the form of inner sense, uncovered the hidden ground of cognition, though he himself remained bound to older notions of time as limitation and burden. Heidegger’s retrieval pushes further, disclosing time as constitutive of human being itself, not merely of cognition, and thus transforming temporality from a subjective form into the key to ontology.
Sherover demonstrates with rigor and patience that Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is not a minor or aberrant text but the essential prolegomenon to Being and Time. Just as Being and Time divides into an existential analytic followed by the excavation of its foundations, so Heidegger’s reading of Kant moves from a close analysis of the transcendental deduction and schematism to the broader implications that emerge when imagination and temporality are recognized as grounding all cognition. In this way the Kant-book clarifies the epistemological structures implicit in Being and Time while offering a more traditional access route to Heidegger’s thought, rendering his otherwise forbidding vocabulary less opaque. By taking seriously Kant’s own claim that time is the condition of possibility for knowledge, Heidegger radicalizes the insight into the claim that temporality constitutes the very structure of human existence.
At the center of this inquiry is the transcendental imagination, which Heidegger identifies as the true mediating power between sensibility and understanding, between intuition and concept. Kant had treated this imagination ambiguously, sometimes as a merely reproductive faculty, sometimes as a mysterious productive power. Heidegger seizes upon it as the key: in imaginative synthesis, sense and thought are bound together through their common susceptibility to temporal form. Here the critical philosophy unveils its deepest ground: knowledge is possible only because the imagination temporalizes, because cognition itself is an act of projecting, retaining, and anticipating within the triune structure of time. To know is to temporalize, and the finitude of this structure is not a defect but the very condition of meaning.
Sherover carefully traces how Heidegger develops this Kantian moment into his own doctrine of concern (Sorge), the existential structure in which temporality discloses itself as the horizon of human being. Concern, future-oriented and projective, is the lived manifestation of temporality in existence; it grounds not only cognition but action, decision, and the unfolding of life as such. In this way Heidegger translates Kant’s categories of knowledge into the existentials of Dasein, revealing the unity of metaphysics and anthropology, of epistemology and ontology. The Kantian analytic of cognition becomes, in Heidegger’s hands, the existential analytic of being, and the ground that unites them is the temporal constitution of finitude.
Yet Sherover is not content to repeat Heidegger’s claims; he probes the tensions and silences in both thinkers. Kant, though he discovered the centrality of time, retreated into the dream of eternity, unable to affirm temporal finitude as the site of freedom. Heidegger, though he made temporality the basis of being, later recoiled from this radicalism, turning toward Being as such and diminishing the priority of time. Sherover examines these shifts not to dismiss them but to show how each thinker struggled against the limits of his own framework, and how philosophy itself must wrestle with the ambiguities of time, temporality, and finitude. The retrieval of Kant is not mere commentary; it is the attempt to think further, to articulate what Kant could not say but nonetheless made manifest.
The result is a book that is as much an act of philosophy as it is a study of philosophy. Sherover’s prose moves between detailed textual exegesis and sweeping reflections on the fate of metaphysics, revealing how the confrontation between Heidegger and Kant is in fact a confrontation with the very possibility of philosophy after the collapse of timeless certainties. To be human, the book insists, is to be temporal; to philosophize is to remember; to remember is to create anew from what has been. Thus Heidegger, Kant & Time is not simply an account of two thinkers, but an invitation to recover philosophy’s own memory, to engage with its past so that it may once more speak to the present with depth, urgency, and vision.
Simon Gros 
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