Online research in philosophy

We argue that no sharp boundary can be drawn between the ``authentic'' human body and its instruments. In contrast to some other theorists of the continental canon--notably Heidegger and the Frankfurt school--Sartre and Merleau-Ponty can be read as asserting that the body (transitively) ``lives'' its instruments, weaving with them an intricate web of habitual actions and experiences. For Merleau-Ponty especially, the human body and its instruments are capable of complementing, supplementing, and melting into one another.

I would like to show how with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, we have to do with three different ways of understanding the experience of the other. For Sartre it is a visual experience, the experience of being looked at by the other, so that the experience of the other is understood as a confrontation; for Merleau-Ponty, the experience of the other necessarily implies coexistence and what he calls intercorporeality, so that for him the other is never to be found in front, but instead beside me, in reciprocity with me; for Levinas, the experience of the other is the experience of a non-reciprocity, of an assymetrical relation, because the experience of the other is for him an ethical and not an ontological experience, and because this experience of the face of the other is the experience of a speaking and not in the first place corporeal presence. There are consequently three different ways of finding an access to the other : the look for Sartre, intercorporeality for Merleau-Ponty and the face for Levinas.

After identifying a crisis in our contemporary understanding of the relationship between philosophy and politics, the author carries out a clarification of three modalities of political expression: the slogan, commentary, and criticism, differentiating them all from the phenomenological expression through which they are disclosed. The essay argues that only through a principled stance against a relativism that would subordinate philosophical consciousness to political context does it become possible to explicate political meaning and enhance our understanding of political practice. The author uses these reflections as an occasion to revisit the political thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, consulting the former on the question of political language and the latter on the essential meaning-structures of praxis. The essay concludes with a reevaluation of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason outside the rubric of critical theory.

After identifying a crisis in our contemporary understanding of the relationship between philosophy and politics, the author carries out a clarification of three modalities of political expression: the slogan, commentary, and criticism, differentiating them all from the phenomenological expression through which they are disclosed. The essay argues that only through a principled stance against a relativism that would subordinate philosophical consciousness to political context does it become possible to explicate political meaning and enhance our understanding of political practice. The author uses these reflections as an occasion to revisit the political thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, consulting the former on the question of political language and the latter on the essential meaning-structures of praxis. The essay concludes with a reevaluation of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason outside the rubric of critical theory.

A biographical overview introduces the work and provides a context for the theoretical issues taken up in the articles, and an extensive bibliography suggests ...

Jean-Paul Sartre develops perhaps the most radical view of individual freedom in the entire history of Western philosophy. The subject is free to create all meaning and to interpret the world, society, and self in anyway he or she wishes. The structuralist and postmodernist philosophies that succeeded Sartre’s philosophy in France and elsewhere rejected this view and put in its place linguistic and social structures that frame all human meaning, including the meaning that the subject experiences with respect to him or herself. It is the characteristically balanced thought of Merleau-Ponty that comes between these extremes and in fact integrates them, that integrates self and society, perception and language, and even human consciousness, the body, and the world—as this essay will attempt to show.

It is argued that in beginning ``being and nothingness'' with the absolute ontological distinction between the for-itself (pure nothingness) and the in-itself (pure being), sartre makes it impossible to understand how the phenomenological account of experience which comes later in the work could be correct. attention is paid almost entirely to the critique of sartre implicit in the chapter of merleau-ponty's ``phenomenology of perception'' titled 'the cogito'. merleau-ponty's divergence from sartre is seen to center around his critique of sartre on the nature of the in-itself, the world, and the pre-reflective 'cogito'.

The article examines the use made of hegel's dialectic of lordship and bondage in kojeve, sartre and merleau-ponty as a means of discussing the problem of merging a phenomenology of social life with a dialectical conception of philosophical narration. it is argued that neither sartre nor merleau-ponty can reconcile phenomenology and dialectic without an ontologizing of politics which ultimately provides a misleadingly abstract account of political life. while concentrating on the period 1945-1955, the article draws out certain implications for the evaluation of sartre and merleau-ponty's later work.

This book discusses the work of the existential phenomenologists - Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir - and the final chapter looks at the legacy of existentialism upon the thought of Derrida and other post-structuralist thinkers.