 When it comes to the question of whether ordinary perception and action involve a kind of intentionality distinct from that of conceptual judgment, it seems fair to say this about Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. They took up the theme of an intentionality that is distinct from and makes possible the kind involved in judgments that posit and predicate properties of objects, and they gave this, each in his own way, a strongly pragmatic cast. Heidegger describes a type of understanding of entities in which they “show themselves” or are “discovered” as “ready-to-hand” or “available” (zuhanden)—in which they are understood in their functionality (as hammers, as doors, as pens, etc.) relative to our aims: we understand them in using them for something. This is a kind of directedness that belongs to our everyday practical engagement with our surroundings. He sees this as distinct from, and making possible an understanding of entities in which they show themselves as “present-at-hand” or (merely) “occurrent” (vorhanden)—as they do when we understand them in a more detached or theoretical way, merely as objects that possess certain properties (Heidegger [1927] 1962, 1982). (For a general account of Heidegger’s taxonomy of understanding, sensitive to recent interpretive controversies, see Wrathall 2013a.) Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012 developed a related view, influenced not only by both Husserl and Heidegger, but by his study of Gestalt psychologists (who were themselves influenced by the Brentano school and by Husserl), in which he defends a conception of perceptual consciousness as a kind of bodily understanding. Partly on the basis of contrasts drawn with case studies of pathologies of perception and action due to brain damage, he argues that, in normal sensory perception, our exploratory and goal-directed movement itself constitutes a way of being conscious of things—and a form of understanding what is perceived—not derived from activities of conceptual categorization and inference (which belong properly to the intellect). Relatedly for Merleau-Ponty: the organization and adjustment of movements involved in bodily understanding, though norm-guided, and experienced, must not be regarded as always chosen— your moves are objects of personal choice only when specifically endorsed for reasons.