K Ant , H Usserl , M C D Owell : T He N on - C Onceptual In

In this paper I analyze some important contemporary criticisms of McDowell ́s conceptualism by Kant and Husserl scholars. Many Kant scholars have recently taken a stance against McDowell ́s reading of Kant in Mind and World, arguing that Kant’s account involves non-conceptual content. At the same time, phenomenologists such as Dreyfus [2013] have drawn on first person descriptions of skillful coping to support non-conceptual content, while Hopp [2010, 2011] bases himself on Husserl’s early theory of fulfillment in Logical Investigations to reject conceptualism. I will show for each of these Kantian and phenomenological theories that although they point to something significant, they fail to trouble McDowell’s conceptualism. I then turn to Barber’s [2008] and Mooney’s [2010] conceptualist readings of the later Husserl. Against them, I will argue that Husserl’s late phenomenology does make room for a kind of non-conceptual content inconceivable from Kant’s or McDowell’s viewpoint, but also that this need not contradict McDowell’s conceptualism.