Online research in philosophy

This paper problematizes the analogy that Hubert Dreyfus has presented between phenomenology and cognitive science. It argues that Dreyfus presents Merleau-Ponty''s modification of Husserl''s phenomenology in a misleading way. He ignores the idea of philosophy as a radical interrogation and self-responsibility that stems from Husserl''s work and recurs in Merleau-Ponty''s Phenomenology of Perception. The paper focuses on Merleau-Ponty''s understanding of the phenomenological reduction. It shows that his critical idea was not to restrict the scope of Husserl''s reductions but to study the conditions of possibility for the thetic acts. Merleau-Ponty argued, following Husserl''s texts, that the thetic acts rest on the basis of primordial pre-thetic experience. This layer of experience cannot, by its nature, be explicated or clarified, but it can be questioned and unveiled. This is the recurrent task of phenomenological philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty understands it.

The passage above comes from the opening pages of Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Edmund Husserl. It proposes a risky interpretive principle. The main feature of this principle is that the seminal aspects of a thinker’s work are so close to him that he is incapable of articulating them himself. Nevertheless, these aspects pervade the work, give it its style, its sense and its direction, and therefore belong to it essentially. As Martin Heidegger writes, in a passage quoted by Merleau-Ponty:

The greater the work of a thinker – which in no way coincides with the breadth
and number of writings – the richer is what is un-thought in this work, which
means, that which emerges in and through this work as having not yet been
thought.²

The goal of Merleau-Ponty’s essay, he says, is “to evoke this un-thought-of element in Husserl’s thought”.³.

The relation of merleau-ponty's work to husserlian phenomenology continues to be a matter of discussion and disagreement. since merleau- ponty considered the doctrine of reduction the ultimate notion in husserl's philosophy, this paper attempts to clarify the relationship of the two thinkers by contrasting their theories of the reduction. such a study indicates that the transcendental sphere achieved by merleau-ponty's reduction is decisively different from that of husserl. hence his philosophy is best understood as the development of a new transcendental philosophy rather than a modification of the original husserlian phenomenology.

In a Working Note to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty uses the fine phraseology of an “architectonic past” and a “mythical time” to describe Proust’s remembrances of things past. This paper first considers how this architectonic past sheds light on Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, and second how this results in a mythical time, which is an originary encounter with this past. Paying also attention to Merleau-Ponty’s final, completed reflections on “Swann’s Way,” Volume One of Remembrances of Things Past, I suggest that by exposing the inner-connection between the two senses of time, Proust is highly significant for Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of “reversibility”. Proustian remembrances are used by Merleau-Ponty not to expose an inwardness, but something that is withdrawn and behind the sensible. The way in which these remembrances operate in myth time bespeaks of a memorial dimension of the past of being itself.

The intent of the article is to define merleau-ponty's place in the phenomenological tradition and, at the same time, to defend his standpoint, especially on those issues where his thought represents a departure from the tradition. although merleau-ponty espouses a form of the husserlian doctrine of the intentionality of consciousness, his understanding of intentionality differs in several fundamental respects from husserl's. the article attempts to show specifically where merleau-ponty's gestalt- theoretical orientation leads him to modify such basic aspects of husserl's concept of intentionality as the noesis-noema distinction and the claim for atemporality of meaning. a critical comparison is drawn between merleau- ponty's concept of intentionality and that of aron gurwitsch. in a more positive vein, the article provides an extended exegesis of merleau-ponty's position on this central concept in phenomenology, and it also tries to relate the exposition of intentionality to merleau-ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception. finally, an attempt is made to reveal the ontological ramifications implicit in merleau-ponty's revisions to the doctrine of intentionality. (edited).

Borrowing conceptual tools from Bergson, this essay asks after the shift in the temporality of life from Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception to his later works. Although the Phénoménologie conceives life in terms of the field of presence of bodily action, later texts point to a life of invisible and immemorial dimensionality. By reconsidering Bergson, but also thereby revising his reading of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty develops a nonserial theory of time in the later works, one that acknowledges the verticality and irreducibility of the past. Life in the flesh relies on unconsciousness or forgetting, on an invisibility that structures its passage.

The chapter on temporality in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception , is situated in a section titled, “Being-for-Itself and Being-in-the-World.” As such, Merleau-Ponty’s task in the chapter on temporality is to bring these two positions together, in other words, to articulate the manner in which time links the cogito (Being-for-Itself) with freedom (Being-in-the-World). To accomplish this, Merleau-Ponty proposes a subject located at the junction of the for-itself and the in-itself, a subject which has an exterior that makes it possible for others to have an interior. This analysis will take Merleau-Ponty to an impasse where, on the one hand, there appears to be an objective world and the time of objects in that world, and on the other, there is the subject’s notion of events and the passing of time. Referring to Bergson’s notion of time, this essay proposes that there must be a temporal interval between perception, feeling and action in order for the subject to be “temporal by means of an inner necessity,” as Merleau-Ponty prescribes.

Borrowing conceptual tools from Bergson, this essay asks after the shift in the temporality of life from Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception to his later works. Although the Phénoménologie conceives life in terms of the field of presence of bodily action, later texts point to a life of invisible and immemorial dimensionality. By reconsidering Bergson, but also thereby revising his reading of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty develops a non-serial theory of time in the later works, one that acknowledges the verticality and irreducibility of the past. Life in the flesh relies on unconsciousness or forgetting, on an invisibility that structures its passage.