Husserl on Perception

In this paper, I attempt to demonstrate the structure of Sellars’ critical direct realism in the philosophy of perception. This position is original because it attempts to balance two claims that many have thought to be incompatible: (1) that perceptual knowledge is direct, i.e., not inferential, and (2) that perceptual knowledge is irreducibly conceptual. Even though perceptual episodes are not the result of inferences, they must still stand within the space of reasons if they are to be counted not only as knowledge, but also as thoughts directed at the world. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how Sellars elaborates and defends this position.

During the last ten years or so, there has been a noticeable surge of interest in disjunctivism, accompanied by the emergence of many different promising disjunctivist positions on a large variety of philosophical issues. However, this positive development has yet to lead to a change in the general attitude towards disjunctivism, which is often one of prevailing scepticism or even disregard. It is still not rare to dismiss disjunctivism right from the start as too implausible or abstruse to be considered as a serious alternative to other views. Not surprisingly, disjunctivism has so far failed to gain the level of attention in contemporary philosophical discussions that it deserves, and which many of its rival positions already enjoy. Part of the reason for this state of the debate is perhaps that proponents and opponents of disjunctivism alike have not always been sufficiently careful in distinguishing the various forms of disjunctivism, nor in determining their precise commitments. This excellent and timely volume—together with the slightly later published collection of classical texts on disjunctivism edited by Alex Byrne and Heather Logue (2009)—is bound to remedy this situation and to improve the wider understanding of both the content and the significance of disjunctivist positions. Indeed, the essays concerned show that any serious attempt at accounting for perception, perceptual knowledge, actions or practical reasons has to take the relevant disjunctivist claims and arguments into consideration— notably those discussed in the volume at hand. The collection brings together seventeen specially written essays on disjunctivism in the philosophy of mind, epistemology and, to a smaller extent, the philosophy of agency and meta-ethics. The standard of the contributions is very high throughout and reflects the quality of the respective discussions in the current literature. As its title already suggests, the book is divided into three parts that are concerned with perception, action, and knowledge, respectively. The relative prominence of disjunctivism in the related areas of philosophy is reflected by the number of papers making up each part: there are eight essays on the nature of perceptual experiences, six on perceptual knowledge or scepticism about it, and only one on the nature of bodily action (with David-Hillel Ruben developing a disjunctive account) and two on reasons for action (with Jennifer Hornsby defending, and Jonathan Dancy attacking, a disjunctive treatment). Thus, all in all, fourteen of the seventeen papers are concerned with issues in the philosophy of perception. This is very much in line with the origin of disjunctivism in discussions of experience and its role in the acquisition of knowledge, as well as with the continuing focus

Edmund Husserl's phenomenological analysis of internal time consciousness has a reputation for being complex, occasionally to the point of approaching impenetrability. The latter applies in particular to his remarks about what he calls the 'absolute time-constituting flow',1 some of which Husserl himself describes as "shocking (when not initially even absurd)" (Husserl, 1991, p. 84). Perhaps it is because many readers of Husserl have found the passages on the absolute flow off-puttingly difficult that they have had fairly little impact, outside the specific field of Husserl studies, on the literature on temporal experience at large—certainly much less so than is the case for Husserl's analysis of temporal experience in terms of the tripartite structure of primal impression, retention and protention. In a major recent study of temporal experience, for instance, Barry Dainton discusses in detail Husserl's early attempts to give an account of temporal experience in terms of that tripartite structure, but mentions only briefly later developments that also feature the notion of the absolute flow, commenting that he "find[s] the relevant Husserlian writings obscure" (Dainton, 2006, p. 160). I believe this state of affairs is unfortunate for two reasons. First, there is actually a fairly straightforward way of making sense of the notion of the absolute flow with the help of some theoretical notions familiar from recent philosophical work on perception. Secondly, that way of making sense of the notion of the absolute flow connects directly to two sets of ideas that are still at the centre of current debates about temporal experience. Historically, Husserl is arguably the thinker who explored most thoroughly the possibilities of what is sometimes called an intentionalist approach to temporal experience.2 And what I want to argue is that his remarks about the absolute flow show what happens if one tries to accommodate, within an intentionalist framework, the thought that temporal experience itself necessarily unfolds over time. More specifically, I want to suggest that many of Husserl's remarks about the absolute flow can be made intelligible, if we understand them as remarks in which he is trying to introduce what can be thought of as an externalist element into his intentionalist view of temporal experience—externalist because it makes how we experience things as being at one time constitutively dependent on how, at other times, we experience them as being. My focus in what follows will be in particular on two recurrent themes in Husserl's remarks about the absolute flow. They are the two themes that offer perhaps the most obvious initial resistance to interpretation. But they can, I think, be made sense of if we understand Husserl along the lines just suggested. The following two quotations provide representative examples of them: Time-constituting phenomena […] are evidently objectivities fundamentally different from those constituted in time. They are neither individual objects nor individual processes, and the predicates of such objects or processes cannot be meaningfully ascribed to them. Hence it also can make no sense to say of them (and to say with the same signification) that they exist in the now and did exist previously, that they succeed one another in time or are simultaneous with one another, and so on. (Husserl, 1991, p. 79) The flow of the consciousness that constitutes immanent time not only exists but is so remarkably and yet intelligibly fashioned that a self-appearance of the flow necessarily exists in it, and therefore the flow itself must necessarily be apprehensible in the flowing. The self-appearance of the flow does not require a second flow; on the contrary, it constitutes itself as a phenomenon in itself. The constituting and the constituted coincide. (Husserl, 1991, p. 88) I will call the claim at issue in the first of these quotes the non-temporality claim. According to it, there is a sense in which the absolute flow is to be thought of as something to which temporal categories such as succession or simultaneity don't apply. The claim at issue in the second quote I will call the self-appearance claim. The flow is what Husserl calls "absolute subjectivity" (Husserl, 1991, p. 79)—i.e., the form that my awareness of temporal phenomena ultimately takes—but there is also a sense in which it includes an awareness of itself. Or so the claim goes. My plan for this paper is as follows. In the next two sections, I will present two existing accounts of the emergence of, and motivation behind, the idea of the absolute flow in Husserl's writings. The first is centred on the thought that Husserl's embracing the notion of the absolute flow marks the point at which he abandons a particular picture of perceptual consciousness developed in the Logical Investigations, which is often referred to as the schema of content and apprehension. The second takes at its starting point the thought that the idea of the absolute flow is meant to block a regress that threatens to ensue if we think of experience as itself a temporal phenomenon. I argue that a possible weakness of these arguments, as they stand, is that they suggest that Husserl arrives at the non-temporality claim and the self-appearance claim by quite different routes. By contrast, in section 4, I outline a reading of the idea of the absolute flow which fares better in this respect. In sections 5 and 6, I subject the idea of the absolute flow, thus understood, to critical scrutiny. In particular, I argue that it is not clear whether Husserl ultimately provides good grounds for favouring the analysis he ends up over a rival, extensionalist, approach to temporal experience.3 Indeed, as I will suggest, it ultimately seems to be the fact that he endorses a form of idealism about time that provides Husserl's principal motivation for adopting an intentionalist, rather than an extensionalist view. The first of the extant arguments connected to the idea of the absolute flow that I want to consider might be called the schema argument. To anticipate, according to the schema argument, the emergence of the notion of the absolute flow marks a general shift in Husserl's views about the nature of perceptual experience—as I will interpret it, its upshot is that Husserl comes to embrace (what would now be called) a version of representationalism about perceptual experience, after initially holding a version of a sense-data view often referred to as the 'apprehension–apprehension content schema', or simply 'the schema'. In other words, the schema argument has it that Husserl comes to realise that the schema does not provide an adequate model through which we can account for our awareness of time. Abandoning the schema, however, generates the need for an alternative account of perceptual experience—and it is against the background of this need that Husserl's remarks about the absolute flow have to be understood.4 The details of the schema are developed in Husserl's Logical Investigations. According to it, perceptual awareness of an ordinary physical object or event involves two 'immanent' aspects: an experiential 'content', and an 'apprehension' that 'animates' that content in a certain way. My being perceptually presented with the relevant object or event just is the upshot of this animation of the content by the apprehension. It is important to emphasise at this point that Husserl's use of the term 'content' is to be sharply distinguished from the way in which that term figures in current discussions in the philosophy of mind. In the latter, the dominant way in which the term 'content' is used is to denote what is also more specifically referred to as 'representational content'. Put briefly, a content, in this sense, is a property of a representation, typically conceived of as the property of the representation having the veridicality or correctness conditions it has. For instance, a common view about perceptual experience at the moment is that it has a content in this sense, somewhat analogously to the way in which a newspaper story, say, might be said to have a content, and that we can characterize the nature of the experience by giving the content it has. Undergoing perceptual experiences, on this representational view of experience, just is one way of representing the world as being certain ways.5 Husserl's understanding of the term 'content', within the context of the schema at least, is very different from the idea of 'representational content', as just outlined. Rather, what Husserl refers to as 'contents', within the context of the schema, are particular sensory occurrences to which the subject stands in a relation that is more basic than the relation of representation. Thus, the view of experience embodied in the schema diverges from, or at least goes beyond, the view sketched in the previous paragraph, in that it (also) involves an appeal to such sensory occurrences as a necessary part of perceptual experience. As such, the view is perhaps closer to the idea that perceptual experience involves an experience of sense-data, except that Husserl, in contrast to much of the Anglophone tradition using this term, does not conceive of our relation to such sense-data as one of acquaintance. They are experienced not in the sense of being objects, e.g., of acquaintance, but in the sense of being (aspects of) episodes we undergo (cf. Husserl, 2001a, p. 273). Thus, Husserl also articulates the idea behind the schema in passages such as the following: [T]he inkpot confronts us in perception. […] [T]his means no more phenomenologically than that we undergo a certain sequence of experiences of the class of sensations, sensuously unified in a peculiar serial pattern, and informed by a certain act-character of 'interpretation' (Auffassung), which endows it with an objective sense. This act-character is responsible for the fact than an object, i.e. this inkpot, is perceptually apparent to us. (Husserl, 2001b, p. 201) The perceptual presentation arises in so far as an experienced complex of sensations gets informed by a certain act-character, one of apprehending or meaning. To the extent that this happens, the perceived object appears. (Husserl, 2001a, p. 214) As Brough (1972, p. 303) points out, we can think of the key idea at issue in these passages in terms of the combination of two theses. According to the neutrality thesis, perceptual experience involves sensory material, or what Husserl calls immanent sensory contents, which "considered in themselves, are neutral with respect to external reference as such, or reference to any particular object" (Brough, 1972, p. 303). The animation thesis, correspondingly, states that external reference or reference to a particular object depends on a second element: the apprehension that animates the content.6 For present purposes, it is the neutrality thesis, in particular, that is of relevance. For the schema argument, in essence, has it that Husserl came to see the neutrality thesis as incompatible with some of the commitments of his analysis of temporal consciousness, and that it was this that lead to the emergence of the idea of the absolute flow. One way of approaching the argument is by asking what it would take to bring experiences of temporally extended phenomena, such as a succession of tones, within the remit of the schema. A fundamental aspect of Husserl's approach to temporal experience is expressed in the following quotation: Temporal objects […] spread their matter over an extent of time, and such objects can become constituted only in acts that constitute the very differences belonging to time. But time-constituting acts are—essentially—acts that constitute the present and the past. […] Temporal objects must become constituted in this way. That implies: an act claiming to give a temporal object must contain in itself 'apprehensions of the now,''apprehensions of the past,' and so on …. (Husserl, 1991, p. 41; cf. also p. 239f.) I will call the general view expressed in this passage intentionalism about temporal experience. Put briefly, intentionalism about temporal experience has it that the fact that we can have perceptual experiences, e.g. as of movement or change, is to be explained in terms of the idea of a particular intentional structure that experience possesses. Husserl puts this in terms of the idea that temporal experience involves 'acts that constitute the very differences belonging to time'. This, of course, is where Husserl's famous tripartite distinction between primal impression, retention and protention comes in.7 Temporal experience reflects 'the very differences belonging to time', in the sense intended by Husserl, in so far as it involves an awareness not just of what is present, but also of what has just been, and—to some extent—of what is yet to come. Whilst listening to the three tones do-re-mi played in succession, for instance, my being aware of the re as present necessarily also involves my being aware of the do as just-past and, in some sense, of the mi as yet to come. This, for Husserl, is required for my perception to amount to a perception of the succession of tones, rather than just a succession of separate perceptions of each tone. And 'primal impression', 'retention' and 'protention' are the terms he uses to designate the forms of awareness of the present, the past and the future, that thus form aspects of any temporal experience. We will have further occasion to examine the precise way in which primal impression, retention and protention figure in Husserl's account. For the moment, the basic point is that the schema, as articulated in the Logical Investigations, seems unable to account for the type of awareness involved, for instance, in retention. The way in which we are aware of the just-past in retention cannot be accounted for on the model of sensory material that is animated by an apprehension. For what could the relevant sensory material be? That, at any rate, is what Husserl comes to think: The just-past tone, as far as it falls into the present time […] is still intended, but not in the sense that it is actually being really and immanently 'sensed,' not in the sense that it is there in the manner of a now-tone […] In short, there is a radical alteration, an alteration that can never be described in the way in which we describe the changes in sensations that lead again to sensations. According to its essence, sensation is consciousness of the now. (Husserl 1991, p. 336) Husserl also summarizes the point here by saying that "the now cannot stand before me as not-now, the not-now cannot stand before me as now" (Husserl, 1991, pp. 334f.). Any account of how I come to be perceptually aware of the succession of the tones do-re-mi, for instance, has to acknowledge that, when the re is sensed, the do is no longer sensed, and the awareness of the do as just-past can also not be explained by there being something other that is sensed now.8 As mentioned above, it is the neutrality thesis, in particular, that means that the schema is incompatible with Husserl's analysis of temporal experience in terms of primal impression, retention and protention. As Sokolowski puts it: the datum cannot be temporally neutral; it has to be a present datum if it is to be around for apprehension and interpretation… And if the datum is present, where do we get any direct awareness of pastness, of the falling into absence which characterizes temporal objects? Consciousness is glutted with the present; the datum is temporally indigestible. (Sokolowski, 1974, p. 146) I have been assuming that the schema, as Husserl developed it in the Logical Investigations, can usefully be understood as a version of a sense-datum theory of perceptual experience, in particular with respect to the element Husserl calls the 'content'. I now want to suggest that his remarks about the inability of the schema to account for temporal experience can be seen as signalling a move away from a sense-datum theory of perceptual experience to a version of what would nowadays be called a representational view of experience.9 On this interpretation, when Husserl says that, as primal impression passes over into retention, "there is a radical alteration, an alteration that can never be described in the way in which we describe the changes in sensations that lead again to sensations", he means something like the following. The distinction between primal impression and retention cannot be captured in terms of the idea of a difference in the properties of something mediating my experience, along the lines of the sensory contents envisaged by the schema. Rather, 'primal impression' and 'retention' simply stand for different, not further analysable, ways my experience is, in virtue of which it can be experience of the just-past as well as the present. This, in essence, is a representational view of experience, associated with contemporary uses of the term 'content', which takes as fundamental the idea of experience as having properties that fix a content in the sense of veridicality or correctness conditions for the experience. More specifically, the upshot of the schema argument is to link Husserl's reflections on temporal experience with such a representational view in two interconnected ways: on the one hand, the claim is that it is his reflections on temporal experience that lead Husserl to embrace the general idea of a representational view of experience, thus understood. Conversely, though, those reflections on temporal consciousness also lead him to add a more specific claim to the general idea of a representational view of experience—namely that, in order to account for temporal experience, the veridicality or correctness conditions of perceptual experience must involve conditions, not just regarding what is present, but also regarding what has just been, as well as (to some extent) what is about to be.10 If this reading is along the right lines, I believe that it can give us an initial handle on at least one of the ingredients in Husserl's idea of the absolute flow, i.e., the thought that the absolute flow is not itself in time, as articulated in the non-temporality claim. Note that the schema presents an account of perceptual experience on which the basic categories needed to elucidate the nature of perceptual experience are themselves occurrences in time: acts of apprehension, and the sensory occurrences that they 'animate'. This is precisely what generates the problem with the neutrality thesis. By contrast, on a representationalist view of perceptual experience, temporal properties apply (if at all) to the vehicle of the experience, whereas retention, primal impression and protention, understood along representationalist lines, are properties of the experience having certain sorts of representational content (in the sense of correctness or veridicality conditions). As such, they are not to be as and the relation between them is not a temporal In section I will suggest that there is an important respect in which the schema argument, as just perhaps does not far and that there is more that be said about the non-temporality claim. But I think the principal idea behind the schema argument is that the non-temporality claim has to be seen within the context of Husserl to embrace a version of after initially adopting a version of a sense-datum theory of experience. On this retention, primal impression and protention are to be understood as representational properties of experience that our perceptual awareness of temporal objects on. As such, they have to be distinguished from properties of the experience understood as the vehicle of that me now to an argument that attempts to make sense of the second type of claim that Husserl makes about the absolute flow, i.e. the self-appearance claim. One that Husserl to again and again his writings on is the of a certain type of regress (cf. pp. The key thought behind what I will call the regress argument is that the idea of the absolute flow, and in particular the self-appearance Husserl's to that The of regress that Husserl has in is expressed in passages such as the following: temporal after phenomenological into […] a flow. But I cannot in the consciousness itself into which of this is For this would again be something temporal that points to a constituting consciousness of a and so in Hence the do I come to about the constituting (Husserl, 1991, p. The as it is articulated takes as it starting point the idea that temporal experience is itself a temporal I the tones do-re-mi played in succession, my experience of them is also an that itself unfolds over time will to this and how it figures in Husserl's in the next But if I want to what makes it possible for me to be aware of temporal phenomena such as the succession of tones, to my experience as it unfolds in time itself will not For such itself the that make it possible for me to become aware of temporal phenomena, rather than making what they Or so the thought behind the regress argument goes. who has perhaps the most to the regress argument, puts the key idea as If the and of a sequence is constituted by consciousness, and if our consciousness of the sequence is itself with and are we not to yet another consciousness to account for the of this and and so p. On Husserl's remarks about the absolute flow have to be seen in the context of a with the nature of The thought is that there must be a form of in experience that is not itself a matter of such experience being as an object of any experience, such as my experience of do-re-mi in succession, I can, of course, become aware of my the experience as well as being aware of the succession of the three tones this cannot what it is for the experience to be a phenomenon in the first on of the regress sketched by Rather, there must be a feature of the experience itself that grounds my to As this of thought Husserl to the idea of a that the experience possesses. Husserl that the intentional act is constituted in he is not saying that the act is to by some other part of is the of the and to say that the act is constituted in simply means that it is to awareness to itself. It is called because it to the structure of the act itself. […] This internal consciousness is not a particular intentional but a of and it is this which and In short, Husserl would claim that to have an experience, e.g., a perception of a is to be aware of the experience. But this is not itself a separate experience in need of yet another The of the experience is an feature of the experience and thus the regress is p. As expressed in this the regress argument might be into two One is the claim that accounts of the nature of consciousness quite have to a of The other is that Husserl's analysis of can provide an account of what such This latter idea is in more detail in the following passage from retention not only the tone, but also the primal That is, the of the flow not only the tone, which has just been, but also the of the flow. In short, the not only us to experience an temporal does not the of the of an object in a of temporal it also provides us with temporal the of the of its object is called its the awareness its is called its the latter the it would be a of Husserl's theory if one to it with a type of Husserl's account of is, in an analysis of the of p. The particular feature of Husserl's analysis that in this passage is one that Husserl himself describes by saying that the absolute flow a (Husserl, 1991, pp. pp. On the one hand, it involves an awareness of a temporal object, such as the succession of Husserl calls this of the intentional structure of the absolute flow its from however, Husserl also that the absolute flow By this he means an intentional in retention, not just the just-past tone, say, but also the awareness of the in primal More specifically, I aware of the itself as just-past only because aware of the primal impression of the as and it is in this sense that I as and it, of my when I to the succession of understood, the regress argument provides for a reading of Husserl's remarks on the absolute flow that makes sense of what I have called the self-appearance claim. But it also comes at a For it the self-appearance claim within the context of a general approach to consciousness, and connects it with a to the idea that consciousness is to be explained in terms of the notion of are at least two one might the regress argument, thus understood, less than the played in it by the notion of One problem with the notion of itself. It has often been as or the idea that it could our to become aware of of our has been thought to have an of or about In the current one way in which this might perhaps be up is by asking what the in On the of it, this notion seems to be in at least as much need of further as the idea of Thus, it is not clear how much further we from trying to make sense of the latter in terms of the Secondly, however, I think there is also a as to how the regress argument is meant to provide a motivation for the self-appearance claim. The more to the is that the regress argument threatens to the motivation behind the idea that the absolute flow involves an awareness of itself from the the absolute flow is meant to in our perceptual awareness of temporal has as in the is that the absolute flow, as described by Husserl, a feature that it to be seen as a type of that does not involve That feature is that the absolute flow, as thus involves and In short, what the regress argument us is that the absolute flow must this feature in order to as a for in this though, there is of the as to the self-appearance claim that, the regress argument to the regress argument, thus understood, is on the grounds for that, in the case of temporal experience, does that experience can only be temporally extended phenomena in so far as it is also past to some extent awareness of these phenomena as they have and will is a sense in which the latter claim is simply for in the regress argument, in order to provide the for the absolute flow as the point at which the regress and for giving

This is a good time to study Sellars. Among the great systematic thinkers of twentieth century analytic philosophy — Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine — Sellars stands out in speaking to our present concerns. A sort of ‘psychological turn’ has succeeded the famous linguistic turn of the twentieth century, and this makes Sellars seem prescient along a number of dimensions. He was less fixated than these others on language; he worked harder to find a place for genuinely internal mental states in a physicalist framework; he paid more attention to perception, as an issue both in the philosophy of mind and in epistemology; and he tried harder to integrate scientific discovery with our commonsense and philosophical projects. In addition, his influence on contemporary epistemology and philosophy of mind — if not on contemporary philosophy more generally — exceeds that of the others; the moves we make today in debates in general epistemology, the epistemology and philosophy of perception, and the philosophy of mind more generally, are frequently deeply indebted to Sellars. Finally, his influence seems to have not yet fully peaked; he may be the only one on the above list who fails to satisfy a criterion I once heard (due to Mike Harnish) for counting as a historical figure in philosophy: ‘he’s dead, and nobody believes it anymore’.

This book develops a unified contemporary Kantian theory of rational human cognition and knowledge. Along the way, it provides accounts of (i) intentionality and its contents, including non-conceptual content and conceptual content, (ii) sense perception and perceptual knowledge, including perceptual self-knowledge, (iii) the analytic-synthetic distinction, (iv) the nature of logic, and (v) a priori truth and knowledge in mathematics, logic, and philosophy. This book is specifically intended to reach out to two very different audiences: contemporary Analytic philosophers of mind and knowledge, on the one hand, and contemporary Kantian philosophers or Kant-scholars, on the other. At the same time, it is also riding the crest of a wave of extremely exciting and even revolutionary emerging new trends and new work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, with a special concentration on the philosophy of perception. What is revolutionary in this new wave are its strong emphases on action, on cognitive phenomenology, on disjunctivist direct realism, on embodiment, and on sense perception as a primitive proto-rational capacity for cognizing the world. The book makes a fundamental contribution to this philosophical revolution by giving it a specifically contemporary Kantian twist, and by pushing these new lines of investigation radically further.

This article first outlines the importance of Brentano’s doctrine of inner perception both to his understanding of the science of psychology in general in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) and to his new science of descriptive psychology in particular which he later advances in his lecture courses on ‘Descriptive Psychology’ at the University of Vienna in the 1880s and early 1890s. It then examines Husserl’s critique of that doctrine in an ‘Appendix: Inner and Outer Perception: Physical and Psychical Phenomena’, which Husserl added to the 1913 re-issue of his Logical Investigations (1900–01). This article argues that, though Husserl promotes a very different method in phenomenology to the method of ‘inner perception’ which Brentano designs for descriptive psychology, one cannot fully understand the significance of the method that Husserl advocates in phenomenology, both in the Logical Investigations and in Ideas I (1913), without (1) distinguishing four different meanings for ‘inner perception’ (as accompanying inner percept, inner reflection, incidental awareness, immanent perception) in Brentano’s thought and addressing (2) the problematic issue of the particular kind of scientific method for his new science of descriptive psychology which Brentano bequeaths to Husserl.

This chapter is about Husserl’s early phenomenology. It is divided into five parts. The first part is about the young Husserl’s years of study and his encounter with Brentano in Vienna and with Carl Stumpf in Halle. The second and third parts are meant to succinctly describe Husserl’s original contribution to Brentano’s philosophical program prior to the publication of his Logical Investigations in 1900–1. In the fourth part, the chapter examines Husserl’s criticism of Brentano’s criteria in his Psychology for delineating the two classes of phenomena and Husserl’s arguments for the delineation of his phenomenology in the first edition of his Hauptwerk. It concludes on a Stumpfian note about Husserl’s reasons, shortly after the publication of his Logical Investigations, to sharply dissociate phenomenology from descriptive psychology.

In this paper, the Buddhist view on language and its implications for perception and cognition will be analyzed. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that archaic Buddhism, as documented in the suttas of the Pāli Canon, already presents a well-articulated theory of knowledge, and that Buddhist considerations on the problem of language are comparable to Saussure’s early linguistic theories, as well as to fundamental issues in the philosophy of perception and theories of cognition. This comparison with Buddhist thought seeks to provide a technical approach to the problem of consciousness in order to structure a systematic dialogue between the philosophy of mind and language, cognitive sciences, and linguistics, offering an original perspective on these topics through Buddhist thought.

Fil: Kalpokas, Daniel Enrique. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas. Centro Cientifico Tecnologico Conicet - Cordoba. Instituto de Humanidades. Universidad Nacional de Cordoba. Instituto de Humanidades; Argentina

Psychology and philosophy have long reflected on the role of perspective in vision. Since the dawn of modern vision science-roughly, since Helmholtz in the late 1800s-scientific explanations in vision have focused on understanding the computations that transform the sensed retinal image into percepts of the three-dimensional environment. The standard view in the science is that distal properties-viewpoint-independent properties of the environment (object shape) and viewpoint-dependent relational properties (3D orientation relative to the viewer)-are perceptually represented and that properties of the proximal stimulus (in vision, the retinal image) are not. This view is woven into the nature of scientific explanation in perceptual psychology, and has guided impressive advances over the past 150 years. A recently published article suggests that in shape perception, the standard view must be revised. It argues, on the basis of new empirical data, that a new entity-perspectival shape-should be introduced into scientific explanations of shape perception. Specifically, the article's centrally advertised claim is that, in addition to distal shape, perspectival shape is perceived. We argue that this claim rests on a series of mistakes. Problems in experimental design entail that the article provides no empirical support for any claims regarding either perspective or the perception of shape. There are further problems in scientific reasoning and conceptual development. Detailing these criticisms and explaining how science treats these issues are meant to clarify method and theory, and to improve exchanges between the science and philosophy of perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Resumo Nas Investigações lógicas, publicadas por Husserl em 1900/1901, a fenomenologia é entendida como uma forma peculiar de psicologia descritiva, elaborada a fim de servir de fundamento da teoria do conhecimento. A peculiaridade dessa psicologia descritiva é que ela seria capaz de alcançar conhecimentos a priori sobre a psique. Neste artigo, procuramos mostrar, em contraste com o empirismo clássico dos séculos XVI e XVII e o idealismo transcendental kantiano, a peculiaridade do método psicológico presente nas Investigações lógicas, bem como o sentido pelo qual esse método foi posto como fundamento da teoria do conhecimento.

Is phenomenology nothing else than descriptive psychology? In the irst edition of his Logical Investigations (LI), Husserl conceived of phenomenology as a description and analysis of the experiences of knowledge, unequivocally stating that “phenomenology is descriptive psychology.” Most interestingly, although the irst edition of the LI was the reference par excellence in phenomenology for the Munich phenomenologists, they remained suspicious of this characterisation of phenomenology. The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the reception of descriptive psychology among Munich phenomenologists and, at the same time, to offer a re‐evaluation of their understanding of realist phenomenology.

Philosophers who contribute new ideas to philosophical discourse are commonly caught by and within the vocabulary which has controlled that discourse before them. Their new ideas must be stated either in the terms already used by philosophers, but with specific notice given of the new way in which they are being used, or in newly coined technical terms which, unfortunately, must be defined and explicated using the available vocabulary. Husserl understood himself as advancing a new theory of intentionality which avoided central difficulties in the theories of intentionality, esp. Brentano’s, known to him. Husserl first explicitly develops his theory of intentionality in the Logical Investigations,1 whose first edition was published in 1900-01. The fifth investigation, entitled “On Intentional Experiences and Their ‘Contents’,” presents Husserl’s detailed analysis of intentionality, distinguishes it from Brentano’s, and initiates an account of knowledge in terms of intentionality, a project which is continued in the sixth investigation. The presentation of the Investigations, even while disagreeing with Brentano, extends Brentano’s notion of what is best called “descriptive psychology.” Husserl, however, soon came to recognize that phenomenology could not properly be conceived merely as a descriptive psychology and that a descriptive psychology was unable to address adequately problems surrounding the nature of cognition. Consequently, he moved beyond descriptive psychology to an explicitly transcendental phenomenology.KeywordsIntentional ObjectIntentional ContentIntended ObjectivityTranscendental PhenomenologyIntentional ExperienceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The simple givenness of ideality The account of the origin and development of Husserl's pure phenomenology so far has identified two important contexts for grasping as a “task” the significance of both his formulation of its method and the achievement of its goals. First, his realization of the shortcomings of a more or less orthodox adherence to the principles of Brentanian descriptive psychology for providing an adequate account of the concept of number formation generated the task of reforming these principles in a manner appropriate for the investigation of the ideal meanings that are operative in mathematics and pure logic. Second, his realization that even a reformed descriptive psychology operated with a fundamental presupposition that prevented the proper methodical access to the ideal meanings of mathematics and pure logic generated the task of reformulating the descriptive moment of descriptive psychology as a pure phenomenology dedicated to providing such access. The task-oriented character of “pure phenomenology” thus signals that it is not a finished philosophical system but a method of research and, above all, that a research agenda drives its methodology. The research agenda of the Logical Investigations is the investigation of the intentional concept formation, or “constitution” (Husserl's preferred word), of the ideal meanings of mathematics and pure logic, the general status of which he termed “ideality”. Rather than focus on resolving the problem in the Philosophy of Arithmetic that led to his rejection of psychologism, the “constitution” of the objective unity of the concept of whole that is characteristic of a multitude, namely, the concept of the collective combination, Husserl's investigations in the Logical Investigations focus on the problem of the constitution of ideality per se .

In defining his phenomenology as descriptive psychology in the introduction to the first edition of his Logical Investigations 1, Husserl suggests that the field study of his phenomenology as his methodology are very close to that of Brentano’s psychology, and that the research in the book somehow contributes to Brentano’s philosophical program, one of whose main axes is psychology or philosophy of mind.