It is a familiar story that, where Kant humbly draws a line beyond which cognition can’t reach, Husserl presses forward to show how we can cognize beyond that limit. Kant supposes that cognition is bound to sensibility and that what we experience in sensibility is mere appearance that does not inform us about the intrinsic nature of things in themselves. By contrast, for Husserl, it makes no sense to say we experience anything other than things in themselves when we enjoy (...) sensory perception. Kant’s conception, then, by doing just that, is nonsensical. I argue that Husserl’s account does not deliver on its promise. Things as they are in themselves are just as cognitively out of reach on Husserl’s understanding of them as they are on Kant’s. Further, the charge of nonsense Husserl raises against Kant’s conception of things in themselves applies—indeed, with greater force—to his own. (shrink)

Our different senses put us in contact with the same world. In this paper, I use unusual objects and situations to bring out structural dissimilarities in the way our senses relate to the same world of material objects. In the first part, I briefly discuss the perceptual presence of spatial and material things. Using uncommon objects allows me to treat this issue without any need to invoke what it is like to have visual experiences. What comes to the fore in (...) these analyses, however, seems less obvious in experiences of the other senses. Therefore, in the second part, I propose a strategy, invoking unusual situations, to weed out the multisensory associations that enrich our normal relation to objects, in order to get a better grip on the perceptual correlate of the different senses. Although the actual correlates of the senses may not be material objects in each case, I explain why they are nonetheless occurrences in a spatial and material world. (shrink)

The notions of perceptual normativity and optimality have generated much discussion in the last decade or so in the literature on Merleau-Ponty. Husserl’s position on the topic has been far less extensively investigated. Surprisingly, however, Husserl wrote a great deal about the question of perceptual optimality. Not only are there a considerable number of important passages scattered throughout the manuscripts, the archive also contains a few important full texts on precisely this issue. Given the role of fulfillment for Husserl’s concept (...) of intentionality, this should not really come as a surprise, since the teleological nature of the fulfillment structure terminates in an experience of the optimum. Hence, however marginal this topic might seem at first glance, reflecting on it rapidly leads us to the heart of Husserl’s project and sheds further light on his conception of intentional experience. (shrink)