How does perception give us access to external reality? This book critically engages with John McDowell’s conceptualist answer to this question, by offering a new exploration of his views on perception and reality in relation to those of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In six chapters, the book examines these thinkers’ respective theories of perception, lucidly describing how they fit within their larger philosophical views on mind and reality. It thereby not only reveals the continuity of a tradition that underlies today’s fragmented scholarly landscape, but also yields a new critique of McDowell’s conceptualist theory. In doing so, the book contributes to the ongoing bridging of traditions, by combining analytic philosophy, Kantian philosophy, and phenomenology. Perception and Reality in Kant, Husserl, and McDowell will appeal to scholars and students working in the history of philosophy, phenomenology, Kantian philosophy, and in particular the philosophy of perception.

The transcendental turn of Husserl’s phenomenology has challenged philosophers and scholars from the beginning. This volume inquires into the profound meaning of this turn by contrasting its Kantian and its phenomenological versions. Examining controversies surrounding subjectivity, idealism, aesthetics, logic, the foundation of sciences, and practical philosophy, the chapters provide a helpful guide for facing current debates.

In the philosophical literature, it is customary to think of perception as being assessable with respect to epistemic norms. E.g., the whole discussion around disjunctivism, which is now often considered to be the dominant, if not the default position in philosophy of perception, is, by and large, framed and motivated by epistemological concerns about truth and falsity. This book argues that perception is normative in another, more fundamental sense. Perception is governed by norms that Doyon calls perceptual, that is, immanent to its own structure. This does not mean that perceptual norms are cut-off from external facts; it rather means that they are constitutive moments of our experience of these facts. Perceptual norms are, in that sense, constitutive or enabling norms in that they establish what perception is. To articulate this view, he draws in the repertoire of the phenomenological tradition, in the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular. Like Kant, both phenomenologists were concerned with the question of the unity of experience and sought to identify the conditions of possibility for having a perception, which they conceive not as a mere sensible experience of the outer world, but as a continuous and meaningful experience of reality. Unlike Kant, however, neither phenomenologist immediately identified these conditions with cognition or epistemic criteria. For both phenomenologists, perception has its own standards, its own conditions of possibility. Perception obtains when it unfolds concordantly or coherently; and when the perceptual progression corresponds to or is in harmony with one's goal or interest, perception can also be said to be optimal. From the phenomenological point of view, concordance (Einstimmigkeit) and optimality (Optimalit?t) are the two basic perceptual norms governing over perceptual experience, and much of the book is devoted to clarifying their meaning and to address the philosophical consequences that follow from this insight.

This is a decisive volume that seeks to heal the divisions in contemporary philosophy.

Phenomenology, together with Marxism, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy, dominated philosophy in the twentieth century—and Edmund Husserl is usually thought to have been the first to develop the concept. His views influenced a variety of important later thinkers, such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who eventually turned phenomenology away from questions of knowledge. But here Tom Rockmore argues for a return to phenomenology’s origins in epistemology, and he does so by locating its roots in the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant and Phenomenology traces the formulation of Kant’s phenomenological approach back to the second edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In response to various criticisms of the first edition, Kant more forcefully put forth a constructivist theory of knowledge. This shift in Kant’s thinking challenged the representational approach to epistemology, and it is this turn, Rockmore contends, that makes Kant the first great phenomenologist. He then follows this phenomenological line through the work of Kant’s idealist successors, Fichte and Hegel. Steeped in the sources and literature it examines, Kant and Phenomenology persuasively reshapes our conception of both of its main subjects.

Lambert Wiesing, Thomas Zingelmann, Introduction SECTION 1. ACTS OF EXPERIENCE Thomas Fuchs, Das Noch-nicht-Bewusste: Protentionales Bewusstsein und die Entstehung des Neuen Magnus Schlette, Die Freiheit, die wir meinen Teresa Geisler, Schmerzlust: Annäherungen an ein widerständiges Phänomen Sarvesh Wahie, Zwischen Einschlafen und Aufwachen Pedro Alves, Mental Life and Consciousness SECTION 2. OBJECTS OF EXPERIENCE Lanei Rodemeyer, A phenomenological analysis of the essential structures of gender: without gender essentialism Sophie Loidolt, Beschreibungen von Öffentlichkeit Jens Bonnemann, Die Erfahrung des Anderen in leibhaftiger und digitaler Kommunikation Tonino Griffero, The Wind Is Not Moved Air: Back To (Quasi) Things Themselves Jonas Puchta, Demut zwischen Wertung und Gefühl: Phänomenologische Annäherungen an einen Modebegriff Inga Roemer, Was also ist die Zeit? Zum "wahrhaft Absoluten" in der Phänomenologie Paolo Spinicci, Caravaggios Judith und Holofernes: Phänomenologische Bemerkungen über die bildliche Erzählung Thomas Bedorf, Situative Difference. A Concept for Political Phenomenology FREE CONTRIBUTIONS Hanan Alkhalaf, The Root of Femininity: A Merleau-Pontian Approach to Iris Marion Young Shewli Dutta, Rethinking Borderline Cases of Personal Identity: A First-Person Perspective Corijn van Mazijk, Do great apes switch perspectives? Husserl, Tomasello, and operative intentionality

Wilfrid Sellars tackled the difficult problems of reconciling Pittsburgh school–style analytic thought, Husserlian phenomenology, and the Myth of the Given. This collection of essays brings into dialogue the analytic philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars—founder of the Pittsburgh school of thought—and phenomenology, with a special focus on the work of Edmund Husserl. The book’s wide-ranging discussions include the famous Myth of the Given but also more traditional problems in the philosophy of mind and phenomenology such as the status of perception and imagination nature of intentionality concept of motivation relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic experiences relationship between conceptual and preconceptual experiences Moreover, the volume addresses the conflicts between Sellars’s manifest and scientific images of the world and Husserl’s ontology of the life-world. The volume takes as a point of departure Sellars’s criticism of the Myth of the Given, but only to show the many problems that label obscures. Contributors explain aspects of Sellars’s philosophy vis-à-vis Husserl’s phenomenology, articulating the central problems and solutions of each. The book is a must-read for scholars and students interested in learning more about Sellars and for those comparing Continental and analytic philosophical thought. Contributors Walter Hopp Wolfgang Huemer Roberta Lanfredini Danilo Manca Karl Mertens Antonio Nunziante Jacob Rump Daniele De Santis Michela Summa