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Husserl and McDowell on the Role of Concepts in Perception

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Maxime Doyon
Affiliation:
McGill University
Burt Hopkins
Affiliation:
Seattle University
John Drummond
Affiliation:
Fordham University
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Summary

Abstract: In his collection of essays Having the World in View (2009), John McDowell draws a distinction between empirical experience (conceived as the conceptual activity relevant to judgment) and empirical judgment (i.e., the fullfledged assertoric content itself). McDowell's latest proposal is that the form of empirical experience is transferable into judgment, but it is not itself a judgment. Taking back the view he advanced in Mind and World, McDowell now believes that perception does not have propositional content as such, but the content of perception can, however, always be actualized in a judgment. There is, in other words, a strict parallelism between the deliverances of sensibility and potential future judgments of experience. The early Husserl disagrees with this and recognizes explicitly the existence of coherent forms of perceptual engagement with the world that is independent of the mastery of language and the use of concepts. Perception constitutes—together with certain other embodied practices—our primary mode of access to the world, and this occurs before and independently of our thinking activity. However, the realization of the centrality of time for intentionality will lead Husserl after 1905 to recognize a kind of lawfulness internal to the sensuous materials themselves, prior to any egoical achievement. The most immediate consequence of this paradigm change is that the very idea of nonconceptual content now seems unwarranted. Indeed, if time is that which keeps the process of sense formation unified even at the lowest levels of constitution, then the world-disclosing activity of the ego cannot be discontinuous with theconceptual realm.

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Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2012

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