This dissertation concerns the role conceptual capacities play in the deliverance of sense contents. Intervening in debates that concern how the normative dimensions of the mind could be squared with the phenomenality of perceptual experience, I defend a minimally conceptualist position modified from John McDowell. I argue, moreover, that this minimal conceptualism is compatible with (is, in fact, already presumed in) existential phenomenology. Whereas critics argue that conceptualism, which grants no independent contribution to receptivity, makes mysterious how experience could exhibit an 'aesthetic' character; and whereas many find support for this objection in phenomenology, my dissertation takes aim at the legitimacy of that support. This strategy lets me propose a way to resolve the debate, not by advocating non-conceptualism, but by widening our resources for thinking about mental capacities. The approach of my dissertation is primarily historical: I argue that the appropriate resources for reconciling the phenomenal and normative dimensions of the mind are located, not in a bifurcated (Kantian) picture, but in a romantic ontology derived from Herder. On this view, the same power to sensibly intuit the world licenses judgment and empirical concept formation, and 'conceptual' capacities are actualized in experience but do not reduce to a conceptual function. With Herder as an interpretive wedge, I can satisfy the epistemological demands of McDowell's theory as well as the commitments of mid-twentieth-century phenomenology. For example, by reconstructing Herder's influence on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, I can defend an account of perceptual experience that does full justice to the irreducibly first-personal character of experience and that, pursued with the right ontology on mind, does not extrude the involvement of capacities that exercise concepts. With this strategy, my dissertation resolves a lingering tension: whereas opponents of conceptualism raise serious concerns about the status of animal perception or the involvement of concepts in practical action, I treat these objections as especially revealing: by adopting romantic resources, these concerns do not even arise.
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