John McDowell rejects the idea that non-conceptual content can rationally justify empirical claims—a task for which it is ill-fitted by its non-conceptual nature. This paper considers three possible objections to his views: he cannot distinguish empty conception from the perceptual experience of an object; perceptual discrimination outstrips the capacity of concepts to keep pace; and experience of the empirical world is more extensive than the conceptual focusing within it. While endorsing McDowell’s rejection of what he means by non-conceptual content, and (...) appreciating his insight into the experiential synthesis of intuition and conception (in particular, its role in grasping objects), I will argue that Edmund Husserl presents an even more comprehensive account of perceptual experience that explains how we experience the contribution of receptivity and sensibility and how they cooperate in perceptual discrimination. Further, it reveals “horizons”—a unique kind of contents, surplus content (rather than independent non-conceptual content)—beyond the synthesis of intuitive and conceptual contents through which objects are grasped. Such horizons play a constitutive role, making experience with its conceptual dimensions and justificatory potential possible; they in no way function like a bare given that is to fulfill some independent justificatory role. Whereas McDowell focuses on how experience does not take place in isolation from the exercise of conceptual capacities, Husserl complements his view by situating experience in a more encompassing whole and by elucidating the surplus-horizons that exceed the conceptual content of experience; play an inseparable, constitutive role within it; and indicate the limits of conceptual comprehension. (shrink)

The work on the sixth Logical Investigation presents, to Husserl and moreover to transcendental phenomenology a new set of problems, questions and theoretical issues, which are deeply related to the concept of intuitive fulfilment. Here, the relation between core and halo, developed in 1908, must be integrated with the concept of horizon as a fundamental stucture of perception and every other kind of experience. The experience also became a contextual experience, essentially related and determined from a contextual situationality. More generally, (...) each appearance consists of a whole system of appearances that are empty of content but are also potential manifestations of the same type. The state of consciousness depends upon the openness to pre-traced potentialities. The horizon, which is part of the noematic dimension described in Ideen I, begins here to presents itself as this fundamental intentional structure. The transcendental fixation of the concept of horizon therefore requires the further elaboration found in §§ 33-34, texts that specifically address the notion of “empty representations.”. (shrink)

Using the 1991 police beating of Rodney King as case study, this paper draws on Husserlian phenomenology to establish a coherentist account of knowledge as situated with respect to its concrete circumstances of production (e.g., social, cultural, historical, political). I take as my point of departure Gail Weiss's phenomenological investigation into the jury's assessment of evidence in the "Rodney King incident," and in particular, her interest in Husserl's conception of the "horizon" as a structure of consciousness that mediates what is (...) present in perceptual awareness. Making use of Anthony Steinbock's work on Husserlian phenomenological method — drawn from his extensive study of Husserl's unpublished manuscripts — I develop an epistemological framework that treats knowledge claims as inextricably bound to the horizons of meaning from which they arise, and provides standards of epistemic responsibility pertaining to an agent's "framing" of evidence. (shrink)

In his paper, “The Dorsal Stream and the Visual Horizon,” Michael Madary argues that “dorsal stream processing plays a main role in the spatiotemporal limits of visual perception, in what Husserl identified as the visual horizon” (Madary 2011, p. 424). Madary regards himself as thereby providing a theoretical framework “sensitive to basic Husserlian phenomenology” (Madary 2011). In particular, Madary draws connections between perceptual anticipations and the experience of the indeterminate spatial margins, on the one hand, and the Husserlian spatiotemporal visual (...) horizons, on the other. I argue that Madary’s arguments, for a Husserlian view of the two visual systems, are not convincing. When the notion of visual horizon is adequately understood as a constitutive notion, there will be reason to regard the connections between dorsal processing and the Husserlian spatiotemporal horizons as tenuous at best. (shrink)

Today many philosophers of mind accept that the two cortical streams of visual processing in humans can be distinguished in terms of conscious experience. The ventral stream is thought to produce representations that may become conscious, and the dorsal stream is thought to handle unconscious vision for action. Despite a vast literature on the topic of the two streams, there is currently no account of the way in which the relevant empirical evidence could fit with basic Husserlian phenomenology of vision. (...) Here I offer such an account. In this article, I show how the empirical evidence ought to be understood in a way that is informed by phenomenology. The differences in the two streams are better described as differences in spatial and temporal processing. Rather than simply “unconscious,” the dorsal stream can be better described as making a special contribution to what Husserl identified as the visual horizon. (shrink)

Along with a static and genetic egological inquiry, Husserl offers a nonegological analysis that advances through different levels or stages of history. Basic phenomenological themes—subjectivity, temporality, intersubjectivity, and worldliness—appear in varying figures with the progressive bringing-into-play of levels that concern conditions of possibility, actual development, and rational goals. In addition, post-Husserlian phenomenology discloses a surplus that brings us to a level outside the reach of history. This scheme confronts us both with the enduring issue of the stratification of reality and (...) with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's contention that philosophical problems are concentric. In order to shed light on these levels and figures, and thus to set in order the main themes of human experience, an attempt might be made to clarify the relationship between them in terms of the determinateness and indeterminateness of horizonality. As for every such level, there emerges a varying stage of rational legitimation; new advances could also be made with regard to the perennial problem of the unity of reason in the midst of its diversity. (shrink)

The article deals with the lines along which manifold senses of horizonedness emerge and their reference to potentiality as a starting-point. The first section examines Gurwitsch's analyses of field-potentialities and margin-potentialities in the light of distinctions drawn by Husserl in terms of latency and patency. It is contended that Husserl's concept of latency encompasses both modes of potentiality. The second section shows how the world-horizon functions as a background-horizon and alternation-horizon conceived of as the two fundamental modes (...) of non-thematic consciousness. In this respect, an attempt is made to link this theme with Gurwitsch's description of the acquisition of the character of positional index as a worldly existent. The third section is concerned with how potentiality develops into an all-encompassing domain that can be anticipated as an ideal totality and into a pregiven ground, and outlines an approach to the complementarity of this threefold characterization. This development falls out of Gurwitsch's framework for the analysis of horizonedness. The article concludes with a characterization of the encasement-of-one-in-another of horizons. Reasons are suggested for the application of some ideas of Gurwitsch on thematic transformation to this sequence of levels. (shrink)