Online research in philosophy

This article pursues overlapping points about ontology, philosophical method, and our kinship with and difference from nonhuman animals. The ontological point is that being is determinately different in different places not because of differences, or even a space, already given in advance, but in virtue of a negative in being that is regional and rooted in place, which Mer-leau-Ponty calls the “hollow.” The methodological point is that we tend to miss this ontological point because we are inclined to what I call transportable thinking, which conceives of things and spatial determinacy itself as being what they are independent of where they are. I argue that we are inclined this way because, in contrast to other animals, we have a weak sense of where we are. We are lost animals. To compensate for lostness, we abstract ourselves from place and conceptualize ourselves and things by way of a transportable, Cartesian “view from above.”.

In this first English publication of a well-known and widely respected Italian scholar, readers will encounter the preeminent interpreter of the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty engaged in a dialogue of critical concern to contemporary philosophy. In subtle and sensitive language eminently suited to the style and substance of Merleau-Ponty's own writings, Mauro Carbone fashions four essays around a central theme-the relations of the sensible and the intelligible, and of philosophy and non-philosophy-that occupied Merleau-Ponty in his later work. An original and innovative interpretation of the ontology of Merleau-Ponty--and themselves a significant contribution to the field of Continental thought--these essays constitute a sustained exploration of what Merleau-Ponty detected, and greeted, as a "mutation within the relations of man and Being," which would provide him with the basis for a new idea of philosophy or "a-philosophy." In lucid, often elegant terms, Carbone analyzes key elements of Merleau-Ponty's thought in relation to Proust's Recherche, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit , the new biology of Von Uexkull, Rimbaud's Lettre du voyant , and Heidegger's conception of "letting-be." His work clearly demonstrates the vitality of Merleau-Ponty's late revolutionary philosophy by following its most salient, previously unexplored paths. This is essential reading for any scholar with an interest in Merleau-Ponty, in the questions of embodiment, temporality and Nature, or in the possibility of philosophy today.

This essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s concept of nature as a “privileged expression” of ontology provides the conceptual support for a more responsible attitude toward humans and nature. Furthermore, this concept of nature needs to be viewed in the light of a more profound concept that opens a new vision of the human being’s place in the world, namely Merleau-Ponty’s fields of perception. Shiva’s writings pertaining to the environment gain a more profound, yet critical, understanding when viewed in this way. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty’s attempts “to reconcile the old world and the new” (MP 1964, 4) through implementation of his phenomenology to political and ethical questions is reviewed anew.

Examining Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Haraway; artificial intelligence that includes "MIT Embodied AI"; newer holistic brain research; animal studies; the ...

Though “dwelling” is more commonly associated with Heidegger’s philosophy than with that of Merleau-Ponty, “being-at-home” is in fact integral to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. I consider the notion of home as it relates to Merleau-Ponty’s more familiar notions of the “lived body” and the “level,” and, in particular, I consider how the unique intertwining of activity and passivity that characterizes our being-at-home is essential to our nature as free beings. I argue that while being-at-home is essentially an experience of passivity—i.e., one that rests in the background of our experience and provides a support and structure for our life that goes largely unnoticed and that is significantly beyond our “conscious” control—being-at-home is also a way of being to which we attain . This analysis of home reveals important psychological insights into the nature of our freedom as well as into the nature of the development of our adult ways of coping and behaving.

This paper studies the role of faces in animal life to gain insight into Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, especially his later ontology. The relation between animal faces and moving, animal bodies involves a peculiar, expressive logic. This logic echoes the physiognomic structure of perception that Merleau-Ponty detects in his earlier philosophy, and exemplifies and clarifies a logic elemental to his later ontology, especially to his concept of an invisible that is of (endogenous to) the visible. The question why the logic of the face can manifest this analogy or homology with the logic of perception and ontology is treated through a study of embryology, which suggests that the logic of the face ramifies a deeper logic of being. Methodologically, the face is taken as something like a lens into the onto-logic of being. This lens suggests that what underlies Merleau-Ponty's later ontology is a logic of animality.

Introduction: The role of animals in philosophies of man -- Part I: What's wrong with animal rights? -- The right to remain silent -- Part II: Animal pedagogy -- You are what you eat : Rousseau's cat -- Say the human responded : Herder's sheep -- Part III: Difference worthy of its name -- Hair of the dog : Derrida's and Rousseau's good taste -- Sexual difference, animal difference : Derrida's sexy silkworm -- Part IV: It's our fault -- The beaver's struggle with species-being : De Beauvoir and the praying mantis -- Answering the call of nature : Lacan walking the dog -- Part V: Estranged kinship -- The abyss between humans and animals : Heidegger puts the bee in being -- Strange kinship : Merleau-Ponty's sensuous stickleback -- Stopping the anthropological machine : Agamben's tick-tocking tick -- Psychoanalysis and the science of kinship -- Psychoanalysis as animal by-product : Freud's zoophilia -- Animal abjects, maternal abjects : Kristeva's strays -- Conclusion: Sustainable ethics.

The development of the emerging science of ecology influenced the later work of both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Both use zoology, biology, and ecology intheir attempts to navigate between mechanism and vitalism, but their interpretations and use of the life sciences take them on divergent paths and lead them to radically different conclusions regarding the relationship between man and animal. This essay takes up the problematic of kinship with animals in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Beyond the texts of these two thinkers are the more general stakes of the relationships between humans and animals and the question of whether or not animals can be our kin.

Jakob von Uexküll's theories of life -- Biography and historical background -- Nature's conformity with plan -- Umweltforschung -- Biosemiotics -- Concluding remarks -- Marking a path into the environments of animals -- The essential approach to the organism -- Heidegger and the biologists -- Paths to the world -- Disruptive behavior : Heidegger and the captivated animal -- The worldless stone -- The poor animal -- For example, three bees and a lark -- Animal morphology -- A shocking wealth -- A fine line in the rupture of time -- An affected body -- The theme of the animal melody : Merleau-Ponty and the umwelt -- The structure of behavior -- A pure wake, a quiet force -- A leaf of being -- Interanimality -- The-animal-stalks-at-five-oclock : Deleuze's affection for Uexküll -- Problematic organisms -- Uexküll's ethology of affects -- The body without organs, the embryonic egg, and prebiotic soup -- Nature's refrain sung across milieus and territories -- The animal stalks.

This paper seeks to propose a direction of research based upon the transformation of Merleau-Ponty's thinking with respect to animal life over the course of his writings. In his earlier works, Merleau-Ponty takes up the position that “life” does not mean the same thing when applied to an animal and a human being because of the manner in which the “human dialectic” alters the human being's relation to life. In his later works, particularly in his lectures on nature, this position softens so that the relationship between animals and humans becomes non-hierarchical, but remains essentially the same: there may be no “rupture” between humans and animals, but they are still essentially distinct insofar as all non-humans can be grouped into a single class of “animality.” I attempt to show that Merleau-Ponty fails to follow through with his most radical insights with respect to the relationships between living beings by preserving this distinction and suggest some ways in which we might today confront this problem through the works of Merleau-Ponty in a way that he did not. The proposal, then, is to take seriously “dialectical” biology and develop a Merleau-Pontian conception of species based upon the interrelations of living beings and their environments rather than focusing solely on organisms as discrete units. The conclusion then considers what the consequences of this understanding might be for our understanding of Merleau-Ponty's ontology in general.