The Argument for Transcendental Idealism at the Level of Pre-Objective Perceptual Experience

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Still focusing on magnitudes, this chapter extends the transcendental idealist argument to the level of pre-objective perceptual experience. Following Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, it argues that ‘the phenomenal world’—the world as perceived and responded to, or engaged with, prior to becoming (if and when it does) the object of true or false representations—makes essential reference to the embodied subject and therefore is no more ‘a world in itself’ than is the objective world, or the world as objectively understood and represented. The chapter then responds to a recurrent objection to transcendental idealism, which attributes to it the patently absurd idea that we create, or bring into existence, empirical facts. That objection misfires, it argues, since transcendental idealism concerns not the existence of things, but the sense they make to us—both in pre-objective perceptual experience, and as objects of true or false empirical representations, or constituents of facts.</jats:p>