Perception and Knowledge
A Phenomenological Account

This book provides an original and provocative account of the nature of perception and its role in the production of knowledge.

Walter Hopp (Author)

9781107003163, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 April 2011

260 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.55 kg

'… one of the merits of Hopp's book is that he gives beautifully lucid accounts of debates that have become highly obscure. I can well imagine recommending the discussions of content and of the non-conceptual to an undergraduate confused by the literature, and I intend that as a sincere compliment.' Nick Wiltsher, The Philosophical Quarterly

This book offers a provocative, clear and rigorously argued account of the nature of perception and its role in the production of knowledge. Walter Hopp argues that perceptual experiences do not have conceptual content, and that what makes them play a distinctive epistemic role is not the features which they share with beliefs, but something that in fact sets them radically apart. He explains that the reason-giving relation between experiences and beliefs is what Edmund Husserl called 'fulfilment' - in which we find something to be as we think it to be. His book covers a wide range of central topics in contemporary philosophy of mind, epistemology and traditional phenomenology. It is essential reading for contemporary analytic philosophers of mind and phenomenologists alike.

Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Content
2. Experiential conceptualism
3. Conceptualism and knowledge
4. Against experiential conceptualism
5. Conceptual and nonconceptual content
6. The contents of perception
7. To the things themselves
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Philosophy of mind [HPM], Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge [HPK]