Steven Crowell: "Transcendental Logic and Minimal Empiricism: Lask and McDowell on the Unboundedness of the Conceptual"

"Transcendental Logic and Minimal Empiricism:
Lask and McDowell on the Unboundedness of the Conceptual"

Drawing on Wilfrid Sellars's critique of the Myth of the Given, philosophers such as Robert Brandom, John Haugeland, and John McDowell have developed accounts of intentionality, mind, and language that are connected in philosophically interesting ways with the neo-Kantian idea of Geltungslogik. In this paper I trace one such connection: John McDowell’s attempt to defend the epistemic value of "experience" by appeal to the conceptual content of perception runs afoul of a distinction between "seeing as" and "seeing that." With his concept of the "boundlessness of truth" the Baden-school neo-Kantian, Emil Lask, provides a way to address this problem and complete the defense.

STEVEN CROWELL is Mullen Professor of Philosophy at Rice University (Houston, Texas). He is the author of Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology (Northwestern, 2001) and editor, with Jeff Malpas, of Transcendental Heidegger (Stanford, 2007). He currently co-edits Husserl Studies and is working on the normative roots of reason.