Abstract

This paper compares two accounts of perception, one by Alva Noë in Action in Perception and another by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception. I address the difference between defending a thesis and developing a descriptive phenomenology. Both authors take into account cases from Experimental Psychology and deal with the problem of drawing philosophical conclusions from them. I describe the link between perception and action in what Noë calls the Enativist thesis and what he currently defends as Conceptual Pluralism, and I attempt to understand whether he is committed to some kind of dualism in his account of the relationship between perception and awareness, comprehension and self. My purpose here is to highlight relevant points for a phenomenology of action in the works of both Merleau-Ponty and Alva Noë.