Online research in philosophy

This chapter studies the theme of the body in Merleau-Ponty by first showing how it is anticipated in The Structure of Behaviour and is central to the Phenomenology of Perception. In addition to illuminating Merleau-Ponty's concept of the body, the aim is to show how the body is, for Merleau-Ponty, a key methodological term, since it marks philosophy's inherent openness to something prephilosophical, to which philosophy must be responsible. The chapter shows how this openness and the body's expressive role in the earlier philosophy anticipates key issues in the later The Visible and the Invisible.

Some poststructuralist feminist theorists hold that the body is merely the product of cultural determinants and that gender is a free-floating artifice. I discuss how this "denaturalization" of gender and the body entrenches us yet deeper in the nature/culture dichotomy. The body, I maintain, needs to be "renaturalized" so that its earthy significance is recognized. Through a feminist reappropriation of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, I develop a noncausal linkage between gender and the body. I present the body as an indeterminate constancy that is culturally and historically contextualized, on the one hand, yet part of our embodied givenness on the other. Interspersed throughout the paper are passages that describe my own bodily condition as I wrote the paper.

Contemporary thought, whether it be in psychology, biology, immunology, philosophy of perception or philosophy of mind, is confronted with the breakdown of barriers between organism and environment, self and other, subject and object, perceiver and perceived. In this paper I show how Merleau-Ponty can help us think about this problem, by attending to a methodological theme in the background of his dialectical conception of embodiment. In La structure du comportement, Merleau-Ponty conceives life as extension folding back upon itself so as to reveal Hegel’s ‘hidden mind of nature.’ In the Phénoménologie de la perception, radical reflection elucidates the body schema as an essence that reveals itself within embodied existence, qua shaping the natural perceptual dialogue in which the perceiver and the perceived permeate and separate from one another. In these two conceptions of embodiment, we progressively see how the dialectical principle of embodiment must reveal and conceive itself within embodiment itself. Science, on the other hand, follows the phenomena of the body to a certain point, but refuses to allow that embodiment is self-conceptual. I illustrate this using the example of dynamic systems theory, an inheritor of the tradition of J.J. Gibson’s ecological psychology. In this way, I show how Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the dialectic of embodiment as self-conceptual is important to problems in contemporary thought.

In Being and Time, Heidegger proposes that the worldhood (essential structure) of the world is constituted by significance, which is what enables us to discover things within-the-world and put them to use. But this conception of worldhood does not take the role of the body in constituting the phenomenon of the world into account. Inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body in Phenomenology of Perception, I have tried to develop a new conception of worldhood in terms of the body using his methodology. I conclude that the possibility of moving (the body) is an essential structure of the world that is equally primordial with the significance of the world, and that together they make up the world we live in. In addition, I suggest that Heidegger has come close to developing such a new conception of worldhood in his Zollikon Seminars.

Merleau-ponty's phenomenology of the intentional arc uniting body and world is viewed as grounded in the meaningfulness and materiality of both. the genetic constitution of the interrelated meaning and physicality of body and world is sketched in a phenomenological interpretation of jean piaget's ``the origin of intelligence in children''. from this sketch emerges an assertion of the priority of action over perception in prepredicative experience.

Merleau-Ponty developed a phenomenology of the body that promoted a non-dualistic account of human existence. In this paper I intend to develop Merleau-Ponty's analysis further by questioning his account of the body on the issues of body perception, and the body's relation to its environment. To clarify these issues I draw from both the phenomenological tradition and recent psychological investigations.

: There is an inherent ambiguity in the notions of inner and outer in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy even as his ideas attempt to reject the duality of transcendence and immanence. In particular, his philosophy of the body is inexplicably silent on the phenomenological experiences of the inner body. In contrast, the discourse and practice of yoga allow for a fresh phenomenological understanding of the inner body. Thus, it seems relevant to consider the wider implications of the practice of yoga to Merleau-Ponty's thematization of the body and the world. The consequences of such a reflection are manifold and suggest that the "inside" can be understood as the phenomenological experience of dimensionality; the yogic practices of body postures and breathing techniques allow or a "perception" of the inner body, which then leads us to understand this perception in terms of the reversibility of consuming and consumed.

Drawing on the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Bergon, as well as contemporary psychology to develop a renewed account of the moving, perceiving body, the ...

This article studies the phenomenology of chronic illness in light of phenomenology’s insights into ecstatic temporality and freedom. It shows how a chronic illness can, in lived experience, manifest itself as a disturbance of our usual relation to ecstatic temporality and thence as a disturbance of freedom. This suggests that ecstatic temporality is related to another sort of time—“provisional time”—that is in turn rooted in the body. The article draws on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Heidegger’s Being and Time , shedding light on the latter’s concept of ecstatic temporality. It also discusses implications for self-management of chronic illness, especially in children.

In ancient philosophy life has priority: non-living matter is made intelligible by living activity. The modern evolutionary synthesis reverses this priority: life is a passive result of blind, non-living material processes. But recent work in science and philosophy puts that reversal in question, by emphasizing how living beings are self-organizing and active. “Naturalizing” this new emphasis on living activity requires not simply a return to ancient philosophy but a new ontology, a new concept of nature. To explore that ontology, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, studying the link between the organism and its environment, the body and the world, as reflecting a nature in which things are already linked in a moving whole. I focus on the topics of expression and movement, putting Merleau-Ponty into conversation with recent discussions in philosophy of science, especially in immunology and in evolutionary theory, and attending to Bergsonian and Hegelian threads in the background of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking.