Scientific knowledge of the senses remains fully inside the world of objects

Evidence

The problem of sense knowledge is raised on the occasion of the appearance in the midst of the world of certain objects which we call the senses. First we established that the Other had eyes; later as physiologists dissected cadavers, they learned the structure of these objects; they distinguished the cornea from the crystalline lens and the lens from the retina. They established that the object, crystalline lens, was classed in a family of particular objects—lenses—and that they could apply to the object of their study those laws of geometric optics which concern lenses. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 841

Categorization

• XREF: Direct backdrop to Beauvoir’s ethics — the Other-as-object vs Other-as-subject distinction she adopts. — connects to: Genuine understanding of a phenomenon requires standing outside it — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 399; Unnoticed items in the sensory field still shape thinking and action — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 366; Everything experienced about an object belongs to it as a phenomenon — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 140 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Establishes what Sartre means by objects in the world vs consciousness — the ontology of in-itself vs for-itself.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Genuine understanding of a phenomenon requires standing outside it — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 399; Unnoticed items in the sensory field still shape thinking and action — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 366; Everything experienced about an object belongs to it as a phenomenon — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 140 (+1 more)