Towards a Husserlian View of Perceptual Content and Justification

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Beyer
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy ; History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 569118221

John McDowell has forcefully argued that there is an “intolerable oscillation” between a coherentist view of perceptual justification, on the one hand, and an appeal to the “Myth of the Given” in order to account for “the world’s impressions on our senses” (McDowell 1994, 18) on the other. The current project aims to elaborate a solution to McDowell’s oscillation problem based upon a (content) externalist and (epistemologically) coherentist reconstruction of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological concep­tion of mental (intentional) content and perceptual justification, respectively. Roughly speaking, externalism claims that meanings or contents “ain’t in the head” (Putnam) but depend on the perceived surround­ing world. Coherentism is the thesis that epistemic justification is not linear but holistic, de­riving from the total belief-system and its (degree of) coherence. The following questions will be addressed: What is the relationship be­tween Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and traditional epistemology? What do Husserl's methods of “transcendental epoché” and “reduction” amount to, are they com­patible with and possibly even lead to a (non-naïve) externalism with regard to intentional contents? Does Husserl's argument for “transcendental idealism” contain a kernel of truth that could be reconstructed epistemologically? Does Husserl have a coherentist (or rather a foundationalist) view of perceptual justification? What is the re­lationship between what he calls passive sensual experience, sensual hyle and perceptual object? At which level is it reasonable to assign veridicality conditions and to speak of per­ceptual objectivity? Is Husserl’s account of active percep­tion and perceptual judgment in terms of “categorial synthesis” fundamentally flawed? What does it mean for something to “motivate” a perceptual judgment in such a way that this judgment is epistemically justified? How does the solution to McDowell’s oscillation problem that emerges from these considerations look like, and how convincing is it, also compared to McDowell’s own solution?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants