This paper argues that John McDowell’s conceptualism distorts a genuine phenomenological account of perception. Instead of the seemingly forced choice between conceptualism and non-conceptualism as to what accounts for perceptual and discursive meaning, I provide an argument that there is a preconceptual intelligibility already in the perceptual field. With the help of insights from certain nonconceptualists I sketch out an argument that there is a teleological directedness in the way in which latent order and structure can be discriminated at the (...) level of perceptual content. This content can then be brought to discursive, conceptual clarity by understanding in such a way that it is guided by the order already discovered in perception. With the help of Husserlian phenomenology of perception, I argue that the fundamental roots of epistemic normativity lie in the discriminating intelligence or mindedness operative below the level of the explicitly conceptual. By preconceptual is meant the directedness of explication of the structures present in the sensory manifold toward fully explicit conceptual judgments. (shrink)

In this article I articulate how phenomenology can and should appropriate the theme of Platonic cognitive erôs. Erôs has two principal meanings: sexual passion and the desire for the whole that characterizes the philosophical life; in its cognitive sense, it implies dissatisfaction with partial truth and aiming at the givenness of the whole. The kind of lived-experience in which the being-true of the world is presented to and affectively allures the knower is a phenomenological analogue to what in Plato is (...) the contemplative communion with the Good. Cognitive desire is always motivated by the consciousness of the lack of knowledge and the recalcitranceon the part of the world to be fully revealed. Husserlian phenomenology confirms the fact that erotic perception is always beckoned by the world and its states of affairs from the outside, as opposed to physiologically reduced Cartesian wonder and internally motivated striving on the part of Kantian reason. (shrink)

In this article I articulate how phenomenology can and should appropriate the theme of Platonic cognitive erôs. Erôs has two principal meanings: sexual passion and the desire for the whole that characterizes the philosophical life; in its cognitive sense, it implies dissatisfaction with partial truth and aiming at the givenness of the whole. The kind of lived-experience in which the being-true of the world is presented to and affectively allures the knower is a phenomenological analogue to what in Plato is (...) the contemplative communion with the Good. Cognitive desire is always motivated by the consciousness of the lack of knowledge and the recalcitranceon the part of the world to be fully revealed. Husserlian phenomenology confirms the fact that erotic perception is always beckoned by the world and its states of affairs from the outside, as opposed to physiologically reduced Cartesian wonder and internally motivated striving on the part of Kantian reason. (shrink)

This book is one in a series of studies by the recently deceased Israeli philosopher Nathan Rotenstreich dedicated to the comparison of the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. Reason and Its Manifestations is an attempt to make the best case possible for Kant’s notion of reason in light of Hegel’s critiques of various Kantian dualisms. Rotenstreich argues that the Kantian dualisms later integrated in Hegel—freedom and nature, theoretical reason and practical reason, will and reason, empirical and intelligible character— are not (...) as discontinuous as one might think. According to Rotenstreich, Kant meant “both to maintain dualities and to mitigate them”. Kant’s insistence on the conceptual dualities in his programmatic first and second Critiques is balanced by Rotenstreich’s examination of the third Critique and Kant’s writings on history, where one finds certain continuities between the very concepts Kant at one point distinguished quite sharply. (shrink)

The first half of Barbaras’s book, which is as lucidly analytical as it is ambitiously interpretive, is an uncovering of the unjustified Husserlian transcendental “objectivism,” Sartrean dialectic, and Cartesian dualism that dominate the early period of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. According to Barbaras, the Phenomenology of Perception is overburdened with the critique of the intellectualist and realist framework of nonphenomenological theories of perception. Merleau-Ponty’s development must be understood as transcending the residue of his former intellectualist point of view deriving from a phenomenological (...) theory of consciousness. His achievement in his later work is to have uncovered the “unthought” in Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, which is precisely the articulation of intersubjectivity that transcends the insular, solipsistic body. What Barbaras traces in comprehensive detail is a teleology that is directed toward an ontological turn based on the primacy of the flesh as that which manifests meaning in the world of perceptual and linguistic sense, even though, as he admits, “We do not have any one text that gathers together the final state of his philosophy”. Nonetheless, according to the teleological reading incited by the later working note according to which the results of Phenomenology of Perception need to be brought to ontological explicitation, Barbaras takes as the basis of the critique the idea that the early work is based on the consciousness-object distinction, later to be overcome in the notions of intertwining and chiasm. Merleau-Ponty later overcomes this separation by disclosing that genesis of the ideality of expressible meaning is based in the perceptible domain itself, but that in turn the perceivable is not to be reduced to the expressible. Through the investigation of expression the being of a “wild world” can be located beyond the earlier opposition between fact and essence, an inheritance of Husserl’s thought the overthrow of which signals the turn toward the Being of the world as rooted in the intertwining of the perceived and expressed sense in speech. Visual perception is conceived simultaneously as “silent logos,” speech, and expression, and ontologically speaking, as the world itself. This entails a radical extension of phenomenality to include that which is invisible in speech and sense. (shrink)