This paper shows that Husserl is not guilty of Sellars’ myth of the sensory given. I firstly show that Husserl’s account of ‘sensations’ or ‘sense data’ seems to possess some of the attributes Sellars’ myth critiques. In response I show that, just as Sellars thinks that our ‘conceptual capacities’ afford us an awareness of a logical perceptual space that has a propositional structure, Husserl thinks that ‘acts of apprehension’ structure sensations to afford us perception that is similarly propositionally structured. Not (...) only this, but there is much affinity and shared motivation between Husserl and Sellars accounts of the sensory stratum. Reflection on phenomenological considerations prevents Sellars from denying phenomenal non-conceptual content, whilst Husserlian ‘sense data’ are technical designations; dependant parts of perceptual experience grasped in abstraction, necessary for providing a reflective/philosophical account of empirical knowledge. I show that both Husserl and Sellars assert that the proper description of phenomenal content affords it the function of presenting properties of spatial objects during perception, and reiterate the well-known fact that Husserl thinks that perception is of ‘conceptually’ apprehended spatiotemporal objects. (shrink)

I argue that phenomenology should take seriously what Wilfrid Sellars calls “the Myth of the Given”. Phenomenologists have either ignored this idea or misunder-stood it. I argue that the Myth of the Given, if understood correctly, could be an objection to phenomenological method. Specifically I argue that Husserl’s static phenomenology is vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism. However, I also show that Merleau-Ponty is not vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism because of how he navigates the relationship between phenomenology and science. This (...) shows that the question as to whether phenomenology is vulnerable to the Sellarsian criticism is more complicated than has been assumed by phenomenologists or their critics. (shrink)

Here I show that Sellars’ radicalization of the Kantian distinction between concepts and intuitions is vulnerable to a challenge grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. Sellars argues that Kant’s concept of ‘intuition’ is ambiguous between singular demonstrative phrases and sense-impressions. In light of the critique of the Myth of the Given, Sellars argues, in the ‘Myth of Jones’, that sense-impression are theoretical posits. I argue that Merleau-Ponty offers a way of understanding perceptual activity which successfully avoids both the Myth of (...) the Given and the Myth of Jones. I also argue that Merleau-Ponty’s approach provides an alternative to McDowell’s critique of Sellars. Merleau-Ponty shows, first, that perceptual activity can be characterized as having a unity and structure of its own which is importantly different from that of concepts; secondly, that the unity and structure of perception can be revealed phenomenologically rather than as a theoretical posit. (shrink)

Phenomenology presents itself not as an explanation or interpretation of phenomena but as a description of them. Describing experience means making its internal structure explicit, which, in phenomenology, is an eidetic structure. The method of phenomenological explication or clarification is, however, by no means univocal. This paper aims to isolate the two fundamental ways in which phenomenological description is achieved. The first refers to a phenomenology of manifestation, based on the concept of determination or datum, which is realized in the (...) phenomenological-static approach and, in particular, on the concept of extensive quality. The second refers to a phenomenology of disposition, based on the concept of tension or force – which is realized in the genetic approach as well as in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception – and, in particular on the concept of intensive or forceful quality. The analysis of the difference between the two approaches allows us to introduce the crucial distinction between digital and analogue dimensions within phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper poses a problem with respect to Husserl’s concept of evidence in The Idea of Phenomenology. In the beginning, Husserl approaches phenomenology as theory of knowledge, focuses on the essence of knowledge, and defines it in terms of evidence. In the middle, he shifts his attention to the definition of evidence as “self-givenness” but gets carried away by the search for a preferred kind of evidence, namely, the evidence of essences. In the end, he remains preoccupied with eidetic knowledge (...) and describes “evidence in the pregnant sense” as absolute, adequate, and apodictic “self-givenness”. The paper shows that these developments have serious consequences for an interpretation of The Idea of Phenomenology as a reliable introduction to Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology and important implications for the phenomenology of evidence beyond this work. (shrink)

Given the undeniable influence of the linguistic turn, it is common to characterize epistemology in the twentieth century as centrally concerned with meaning. But many of the early twentieth-century figures who helped to inspire that turn did not characterize meaning exclusively in terms of language. In response to contemporary accounts that tend to limit the scope of meaning to the semantic, pragmatic or conceptual, I use the work of Husserl and Wittgenstein to argue for the importance of non-linguistic aspects of (...) lived experience (Erlebnis) to the theory of meaning, situating the project historically as a legacy of Kant's Critical epistemology and systematically in terms of contemporary debates about the role and status of nonconceptual content. -/- I argue in Chapter One that a robust theory of meaning must take account of the way the conditions of the possibility for meaning are determined by intrinsically value-bearing features of everyday experience, features that are not themselves inherently linguistic or conceptual. Most contemporary nonconceptualist accounts of perceptual experience fail to adequately theorize the role of the nonconceptual on its own terms, reducing nonconceptual elements of experience to that of mere "fodder" for conceptualization and ignoring the epistemic role the nonconceptual plays in determining structural conditions of possibility. This can be overcome through a transcendental-constitutional approach that examines the full range of experiential structures--including those not mediated by language or concepts--by which meaning is constituted. -/- Tracing a series of parallel developments in the theories of meaning of Husserl and Wittgenstein in Chapters Two through Five, I argue that--despite important differences--both authors' later conceptions of meaning necessarily include accounts of its relation to an inexact, non-linguistic dimension of experiential life: the lifeworld (Husserl) or form(s) of life (Wittgenstein). What appears from the standpoint of linguistic and conceptual analysis to be an unfortunate inexactness is in terms of the later conceptions of both philosophers not the result of incomplete analysis, but of a recognition of the ontological primacy of the lived and fundamentally social phenomenon of meaningfulness that characterizes our experience in a way that outstrips conceptual and linguistic representation. (shrink)