Online research in philosophy

This paper examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy of time in light of his critique and reconceptualization of Edmund Husserl’s early time-analyses. Drawing on The Visible and the Invisible and lecture courses, I elaborate Merleau-Ponty’s re-reading of Husserl’s time-analyses through the lens of Rudolf Bernet’s “Einleitung” to this work. My question is twofold: what becomes of the central Husserlian concepts of present and retention in Merleau-Ponty’s later work, and how do Husserl’s elisions, especially of the problem of forgetting, become generative moments for Merleau-Ponty’s thought on time? The answer passes through the logic of institution as the “retrograde movement of the true” (Henri Bergson) and through unconsciousness as disarticulation of the perceptual field, as Merleau-Ponty attempts to detach Husserlian concepts from the philosophy of consciousness and rehabilitate them within an ontology of time.

Written between 1945 and 1947, the essays in Sense and Non-Sense provide an excellent introduction to Merleau-Ponty's thought.

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy attempts to locate meaning-sense-within being. Space and time are thus ingredient in sense. This is apparent in his earlier studies of structure, fields, expression and the body schema, and the linkage of space, time and sense becomes thematic in Merleau-Ponty’s later thinking about institution, chiasm and reversibility. But the space-time-sense linkage is also apparent in his studies of embryogenesis. The paper shows this by reconstructing Merleau-Ponty’s critical analysis of Driesch’s embryology (in the nature lectures) to demonstrate how, for Merleau-Ponty, embryogenesis entails a principle of sense-generation that is irreducible to the plenitude of space or spatial distributions of material, yet is inseparable from being and spatial facts. This principle indicates a ‘depth’ or ‘hollow’ internal to “flat being,” in virtue of which being can create more sense than is yet given. The paper illuminates this ‘depth’ and the role of space in sense by turning to some recent scientific accounts-of bees deciding on new nesting places, of termites building mounds, and of embryogenesis-to suggest how space is inherently ingredient in the genesis of sense. This depends on turning from a concept of space as extensive to place as intensive, for it is the intensity of places, rather than the extensity of already delineated spaces, that affords sense generation.

Not only does peirce's theory of meaning as dispositional or as habit contain parallels with merleau-ponty's view of meaning in the structure of human behavior, but also both peirce and merleau-ponty alike attack reductivistic theories of perception. within this context, the present paper focuses on the use of kantian schemata in the philosophies of peirce and merleau-ponty, but to the extent that such incorporations are consistent with trends in pragmatism and phenomenology in general, it will reveal points of encounter not just between peirce and merleau-ponty but between pragmatism and phenomenology in general.

A focus on the relation between sensation and the perceptual object in the philosophies of G H Mead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty points toward their shared views of perception as non-reductionistic and holistic, as inextricably tied to the active role of the sensible body, and as involving a new understanding of the nature of immediacy within experience. This essay explores these shared views.

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.