ABSTRACT
John McDowell draws a distinction between empirical experience and empirical judgment. McDowell's latest proposal is that the form of empirical experience is transferable into judgment, but it is not itself a judgment. The early Husserl disagrees with this and recognizes explicitly the existence of coherent forms of perceptual engagement with the world that is independent of the mastery of language and the use of concepts. Perception constitutes together with certain other embodied practices our primary mode of access to the world, and this occurs before and independently of our thinking activity. Kant's critical project from a phenomenological point of view is to have introduced within the scope of its investigation the question of intentionality. Kant wonders how experience possesses the requisite unity so much as to be of an object at all. The Kantian problematic concerns the conditions of possibility of being able to enjoy an intelligible experience of the external world and to prove the objective validity of judgment.
