Taking the Intentionality of Perception Seriously: Why Phenomenology is Inescapable

Recent attempts to bridge Buddhist and Western philosophical accounts of perception and consciousness have been prompted in large measure by two sets of arguments: on the one hand those that set out to defend a conceptualist view of perception, and on the other those that take perception to have a self-intimating but non-conceptual aspect. This essay offers an innovative take on the conceptualist/non-conceptualist debate in the works of Dignāga, Dharmakīrti, and their followers by deriving insights from the phenomenology of perception. It argues that it is possible to conceive of the reflexivity of perceptual awareness (its self-intimating aspect) as intentionally structured without being at the same time transcendently constituted as a form of radical subjectivity.