ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses some of the defining features of perception, and the various ways in which other kinds of intentional acts depend on or refer back to it. He also defends Edmund Husserl's views on the fundamentality of perception against the objection that his theory is a version of the "Myth of the Given". Phantasy, when intuitive, is a modification of actual positing perception into as-if or quasi-perception. Nevertheless, the category of the given in Husserl is a decidedly epistemic one, and one of its primary functions, for Husserl, is precisely to serve as a foundation of knowledge, whether that knowledge is empirical, a priori, or phenomenological. Nonintuitive acts refer back to perception insofar as they require it for their sense and, in the case of judgments, for their epistemic status. Husserl’s account of perception and its role in knowledge does not, moreover, fall to Wilfrid Sellars’s arguments against the Myth of the Given.
