Kant and Phenomenology

ROCKMORE, Tom. Kant and Phenomenology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. 258 pp. Cloth, $45.00- The purpose of this targeted work is to examine a phenomenological approach to epistemology, and specifically, to address the relation between "reality," "phenomena" and "appearance" in light of the enduring question of how it is possible to grasp reality as such. Rockmore argues that phenomenology, broadly conceived, extends beyond Husserl importantly back to Kant. He argues that Husserl's, Heidegger's, and Merleau-Ponty's so-called nonconstructivist approaches to phenomenology fail to solve this problem and suggests that Kant's "constructivist strategy" is more effective in addressing it. The major view espoused in nonconstructivist phenomenological accounts is that reality is knowable because it appears. Constructivism - the view "that a minimal conditional of knowledge is that the cognitive subject must 'construct' the cognitive subject" - "turns away from a claim to know the way the world is in itself for a claim to know whatever is given in experience." Contrary to constructivism is representationalism, in which phenomena and appearances (which are run together) are understood to represent reality in itself. Rockmore recommends phenomenological approaches to epistemology to follow the spirit of the critical philosophy and constructivism. This can be done by looking to Hegel, who stresses that "knowledge does not concern the world in itself but the world for us, which we only know through conscious phenomena," which forces us to grapple with the problem of knowledge as lying "in understanding how 'we' construct phenomenon in the interaction between [finite] human beings and situated within the historical process in which we come to know the world and ourselves."