MAIN RESEARCH PROJECTS
2025 – 2030
Perceptual Plasticity
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRSC)
Program Insight
Over the course of a lifetime, our perceptual capacities and dispositions undergo all kinds of transformations and alterations. Some of these changes are due to causal or physiological factors (e.g., genetics, growth, maturation, injuries, illnesses, aging, etc.), while others are shaped by motivational processes (of learning, adaptation, compensation, etc.), but in either case, they impact long-lastingly our ability to cope with perceptual information. The process whereby perceivers adapt, modify, and reorganize (consciously or unconsciously) their sensory processing mechanisms and perceptual abilities as a result of physiological or biological changes or in response to changes in sensory input or experiences corresponds to what I refer to as ‘perceptual plasticity.’ The aim of this project is to provide a first-personal analysis of these changes and, on that basis, to elaborate a phenomenological theory of perception as plastic, i.e., as resulting from continuous dynamical changes.
2012 – 2024
Normativity in Perception
With the financial support of the Humboldt Foundation (Germany), the FRQSC (Québec), SSHRCC (Canada), and the Aesop research chair in philosophy (Montréal).
In the philosophical literature, it is customary to think of perception as being assessable with respect to epistemic norms. E.g., the whole discussion around disjunctivism, which is now often considered to be the dominant, if not the default position in philosophy of perception, is, by and large, framed and motivated by epistemological concerns about truth and falsity. My research aims to show that perception is normative in another, more fundamental sense. Perception is governed by norms that I call perceptual, that is, immanent to its own structure. This does not mean that perceptual norms are cut-off from external facts; it rather means that they are constitutive moments of our experience of these facts. Perceptual norms are, in that sense, constitutive or enabling norms in that they establish what perception is. To articulate my view, I draw in the repertoire of the phenomenological tradition, in the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular. For both phenomenologists, perception obtains when it unfolds concordantly or coherently; and when the perceptual progression corresponds to or is in harmony with one’s goal or interest, perception can also be said to be optimal. From the phenomenological point of view, concordance and optimality are the two basic perceptual norms governing over perceptual experience, and much of my research on this topic is devoted to clarifying their meaning and to address the philosophical consequences that follow from this insight. It culminated in a book published in 2024 at Oxford University Press called Phenomenology and the Norms of Perception. It is organized around 7 chapters. In the first two chapters, I lay out the conceptual and historical background for the view I’m defending by outlining Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception, illusions, and hallucinations. The following five chapters put this theory to test in the broader philosophical landscape by engaging in five ongoing debates in philosophy of mind and perception.
2005 – 2011
Reconfigurations of the Transcendental
With the financial support of the DAAD (Germany).
While the term ‘transcendental’ characterizes in Kant’s critical philosophy a type of philosophical inquiry that questions the conditions of possibility of experience, the vast majority of philosophers in the twentieth-century European tradition have, in Hegel’s wake, questioned Kant’s notion of the transcendental, and the simplicity of its opposition to the empirical. In Adorno, for example, the Kantian motif of ‘conditions of possibility’ has been historicized: the transition from metaphysics to materialism described in Negative Dialectic leads to the elaboration of a ‘quasi-transcendental’ materialism whose rationality bears the marks of history and tradition. Arguments and strategies aimed at complicating the relationship between the transcendental and the empirical can also be spotted in the French poststructuralists. Derrida describes his concepts of trace, writing and différance as ‘quasi-transcendental’; Deleuze speaks of a ‘transcendental empiricism’ and Foucault of a ‘historical apriori’. In the phenomenological tradition, the rejection of the opposition between the empirical and the transcendental has been even more decisive. The historicization of the transcendental accomplished by Husserl’s genetic phenomenology left the boundaries between the empirical and the transcendental porous, paving the way for the notion of ‘chiasm’ at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s later work. The Heideggerian notion of being also forms a kind of transcendental condition of possibility (of manifestation and intelligibility in general), but it is a condition that changes ‘epochally’ according to the faithful consignments of being (Seinsgeschick).
This brief historical overview shows that far from simply rejecting the Kantian distinction, most of the leading figures of continental philosophy have instead worked (more or less explicitly) to re-elaborate the opposition between the empirical and the transcendental. My research project aimed at reconstructing this segment of philosophical history following the thread of this question, central among them all. Part of this project was published in my book: Der transzendentale Anspruch der Dekonstruktion: Zur Erneuerung des Begriffs ‘transzendental’ bei Derrida.
RESEARCH TEAMS
2019 – now
International Society of Phenomenological Studies (ISPS)
2013 – now
Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire sur la normativité (GRIN)
2013 – now
Laboratoire de philosophie continentale (Université Laval)
INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH GRANTS
2022 – 2023
Research Project: Normativity and Perception
Humboldt Foundation, Research Fellowship (six month)
Program for Experienced Researchers
40,000$
2020 – 2024
Research Project: The Unity of Perception
AESOP Research Chair of Philosophy, Université de Montréal
140, 000$
2019 – 2024
Research Project: Phenomenology and the Norms of Perception
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRSC)
Program Insight
71, 588$
2014 – 2017
Research project: Husserl’s Phenomenology of Perceptual Norms
Fonds de Recherche du Québec en Science et Culture (FRQSC)
Program Établissement de nouveaux professeurs/chercheurs
50, 292$
Maxime Doyon 