Abstract

This dissertation deals with the nature of perception and with the body's unique role in mediating perception. Its methods are both historical and phenomenological: they are historical insofar as I relate the problem of perception to issues arising out of Kant's thought, and phenomenological in that I offer a new account of perception that is grounded in concrete analyses of perceptual experience. I argue that a phenomenological analysis of perception requires us to adopt what Kant called a reflective understanding of perceptual experience. Perception is manifestly a matter of assessing particular elements and objects, and Kant's model of reflective judgment, when extended beyond Kant's narrow interpretation of it, reveals how the perception of particulars is possible. The dissertation shows in detail how deeply reflective judgment informs perceptual experience and how it is rooted in the reflective capacities of the body. ;I provide an analysis of one form of reflective judgment, measurement, and show how it functions in our concrete, bodily engagement with the perceptual world. Through a phenomenological analysis, I show that in measuring we neither grasp the world in its purely objective state, as empiricism has asserted, nor impose arbitrary, human norms upon nature, as idealism has claimed. Instead, measurement involves a process of reflective comparison, of taking up certain actual elements of our the world as standards for assessing other elements. I extend this model to other areas of human experience, including natural science, language, and abstract thinking, and argue that it can serve as a general model for human experience and judgment as such