Maurice Merleau-Ponty

George Berkeley's apparently strange view – that nothing exists without a mind except for minds themselves – is notorious. Also well known, and equally perplexing at a superficial level, is his insistence that his doctrine is no more than what is consistent with common sense. It was every bit as crucial for Berkeley that it be demonstrated that the colors are really in the tulip, as that there is nothing that is neither a mind nor something perceived by a mind. (...) In what follows, I shall attempt to re-examine Berkeley's argument in terms of what it appears to have meant to him. I am especially interested in the connection between Berkeley's thought concerning the relation between perception and metaphysics and that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with whom, perhaps surprisingly, Berkeley shared a great many intuitions and concerns. Thus part of my objective is to compare and contrast the work of two thinkers who had many common interests, and whose thought frequently led them down similar paths. I shall be especially interested in apparent points of departure, both those that turn out to reflect real divergences and those which reflect confusions of one kind or another. My main objective, however, is not mere textual analysis. Like both Berkeley and Merleau-Ponty, my main hope is to make progress in clarifying how things are. As odd as some of Berkeley's pronouncements may sound to contemporary ears – concerning especially the metaphysical consequences of what he regarded as perceptual facts – I shall argue that, in substance, he was often not far wrong at all – at least as measured by important strands of more contemporary work on the subject. More particularly, I shall contend that for going a long way down an extraordinarily fruitful path which has been subsequently explored more fully by (especially) Martin Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nelson Goodman and Hilary Putnam, Berkeley deserves considerably more credit than he is usually accorded as a progenitor of contemporary approaches to metaphysical issues. (shrink)

In several papers, Mark Wrathall argued that French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, identifies a sui generis type of grounding, one not reducible to reason or natural causality. Following the Phenomenological tradition, Merleau-Ponty called this form of grounding “motivation,” and described it as the way in which one phenomenon spontaneously gives rise to another through its sense. While Wrathall’s suggestion has been taken up in the practical domain, its epistemic import has still not been fully explored. I would like to take up (...) the epistemic dimension of Wrathall’s thought in this paper. Following Wrathall, I explain how motivation can help us understand the manner in which perceptions ground singular, experiential judgments. But I extend this work in two ways. First, I suggest some additional considerations that support Wrathall’s view. Second, I argue that motivation can also help account for the way perceptions ground general judgments. My aim here will not be so much to rule out other answers to these longstanding epistemological questions, as to show that motivation carves out an attractive epistemological space. (shrink)

In "Motivation and the Primacy of Perception," I offer an interpretation and defense of Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the "primacy of perception," namely, that knowledge is ultimately founded in perceptual experience. I use Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological conception of "motivation" as an interpretative key. As I show, motivation in this sense amounts to a novel form of epistemic grounding, one which upends the classical dichotomy between reason and natural causality, justification and explanation. The purpose of my book is to show how this novel (...) conception of epistemic ground allows Merleau-Ponty to offer a radically new account of knowledge and its relation to perception. -/- Over the course of seven chapters, I show that through the notion of motivation, Merleau-Ponty offers a compelling alternative to the empiricist and rationalist assumptions that underpin modern epistemology. Indeed, I argue that Merleau-Ponty's epistemological thinking is preferable to its major historical and contemporary competitors, including what I see as the other great alternative to rationalism and empiricism: Kant's transcendental idealism. -/- Bridging phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, "Motivation and the Primacy of Perception" argues that epistemology has long been hampered by an inadequate phenomenology of knowledge. However, a careful description of the phenomenon of motivation can offer compelling new ways to think about knowledge and longstanding epistemological questions. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) essentially aims at debunking the myth of objectivity. The Phenomenology takes the entire Western tradition to task over its reliance on the objective attitude, showing how this attitude structures the architectonics of idealism and empiricism. These philosophies share the same presuppositions: their metaphysics and epistemologies are inherently dualistic. The problematics that stem from this objectivism have informed the Western understanding of God. This essay undertakes an examination of one of the more extended treatments of God (...) in Merleau-Ponty's magnum opus. The aim is not to justify or critique the objective attitude per se, but to show some of its radical implications for theology after Descartes. The passage of focus is on pages 358–9 in the English translation of the Phenomenology. The attempt here is to bring some of the research on Merleau-Ponty into dialogue with the philosophy of religion, and is a tentative step in a larger project of looking at the role of God in Merleau-Ponty's corpus. (shrink)

Ce texte cherche à interroger l'œuvre de Merleau-Ponty à travers la métaphore de l'écriture: de la Phénoménologie de la perception jusqu'aux dernières notes du Visible et l'invisible, un même réseau conceptuel revient en effet, celui de la trace, du texte, de l'inscription, et nous avons tenté d'en cerner le sens et la fonction. L'écriture, le « texte du monde », c'est d'abord le sol fondamental, l'originaire dont la phénoménologie est en quête, et qu'elle tente de dévoiler sous les idéalités du (...) langage constitué; c'est ensuite, selon la lecture que Merleau-Ponty entreprend de Saussure, l'écart, la différence interne au procès des significations — l'écriture ou la trace n'étant plus alors ce « texte original » auquel il nous faudrait sans cesse revenir, mais l'épaisseur même du langage se reprenant sans cesse. Parce qu'elle est à la fois à la recherche de l'expérience première et qu'elle a renoncé à l'illusion d'une transparence du langage, d'une coïncidence muette, la philosophie est une bien étrange traduction: ce qu'elle écrit à son tour vise à « rendre » le visible ou le sensible, mais ce sensible « n'offre rien qu'on puisse dire si l'on n'est pas philosophe ou écrivain ». The aim of this text is to probe Merleau-Ponty's work through the metaphor of writing from the Phenomenology of Perception to the final notes of The Visible and The Invisible. A common conceptual system reoccurs, of trace, text, and inscription; we have striven to define its meaning and function, Writing, this « world text », is primarily the native ground which phenomenology attempts to reveal through the idealities of constituted language. Secondly, as Merleau-Ponty endeavours to read through Saussure, it would be the space, the internal difference between significations. In this sense, writing or traces would no longer be this original text to which we must endlessly refer, but the density of language itself. Since philosophy is simultaneously seeking out the primordial experience and has shed the illusion of language transparency, and unvoiced coincidence, its role is paradoxical: what it writes aims at restituting the visible or the sensible, though this sensible « offers nothing that could be said by him who his not a philosopher or a writer ». (shrink)

生とは一体何か。また生はどのように現れるのか。それは、現象学において生活（としての）世界（Lebenswelt）として現れる。だが、フッサールが試みる生活世界の存在論は、狭義の生の現象学ではない。加え て、彼は生活世界を自我の超越論的生から理解する。この問題を解決するには、ハイデッガー、M.アンリ、レヴィナスによる様々な生の現象学があるが、それに対して徹底的な反論がある。生の現象学を凌駕するには、メ ルロ＝ポンティと共に、生きることの形而上学を取り上げる必要がある。それは、意識の様々な「段階」（驚き及び認識）、「豊かな矛盾」、「フェール（なす、作る、・・・させる）」（faire）等といった概念を通 じて可能になる。.

I begin by comparing and contrasting Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysical project with the views of philosophers, such as Wolff, Leibniz, Bergson, Sartre, and Heidegger. Focusing on Merleau-Ponty’s most striking “metaphysical question,” the one about “bringing into being” (faire-être), I then show how it contrasts with notions such as being, non-being, and “being-made” (être fait). Responding to three objections to this theory, I, first, show how “making” (faire) is distinct from “acting.” Second, I argue that “bringing into being” is only actualized in “metaphysical (...) consciousness”, when it shifts from wondering before the paradox to realizing that the contradiction can be fruitful. This is a critique of the foundation metaphysics in Aristotle and Plato. Third, I propose four arguments in order to counter the view that Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysics is just the unthinkable blind spot of his thought. I conclude by showing that his emphasis on consciousness allows us to distinguish three meanings of unconsciousness. (shrink)

At first blush, phenomenology seems to be concerned preeminently with questions of knowledge, truth, and perception, and yet closer inspection reveals that the analyses of these phenomena remain bound up with language and that consequently phenomenology is, inextricably, a philosophy of language. Drawing on the insights of a variety of phenomenological authors, including Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, this collection of essays by leading scholars articulates the distinctively phenomenological contribution to language by examining two sets of questions. The first (...) set of questions concerns the relatedness of language to experience. Studies exhibit the first-person character of the philosophy of language by focusing on lived experience, the issue of reference, and disclosive speech. The second set of questions concerns the relatedness of language to intersubjective experience. Studies exhibit the second-person character of the philosophy of language by focusing on language acquisition, culture, and conversation. This book will be of interest to scholars of phenomenology and philosophy of language. (shrink)

This article reconsiders Husserl’s concept of Leib in light of Merleau‐Ponty’s interpretation of the human body as an ontologically significant phenomenon. I first analyze Husserl’s account of the body as a “two‐fold unity” and demonstrate the problematic nature of its four implications, namely, the ambiguous ontological status of the body as subject‐object, the view of “my body” as “my object,” the preconstitutive character of the unity of the body, and the restriction of the constitution of the body to touch alone. (...) Building on this analysis, I explain how Merleau‐Ponty resolves the difficulties raised by Husserl’s account by reversing it. According to Merleau‐Ponty, “flesh” is not a two‐fold reality comprising subjective and objective aspects, but an ontological dimension from which these aspects can be abstracted through specific cognitive operations. Consequently, all subjective and objective aspects, even beyond the boundaries of one’s body, must be understood as founded in the indivisible unity of flesh. I argue that a thorough phenomenological description of the human body requires abandoning Husserl’s concept of Leib because it contributes to perpetuating subject‐object dualism. In contrast, Merleau‐Ponty’s notion of flesh reveals the circularity between subject and object and its general ontological significance. (shrink)

Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following (...) Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. (shrink)

The years between 1833 and 1945 fundamentally transformed science’s understanding of the body’s inner senses, revolutionizing fields like philosophy, the social sciences, and cognitive science. In How We Became Sensorimotor, Mark Paterson provides a systematic account of this transformative period, while also demonstrating its substantial implications for current explorations into phenomenology, embodied consciousness, the extended mind, and theories of the sensorimotor, the body, and embodiment. -/- Each chapter of How We Became Sensorimotor takes a particular sense and historicizes its formation (...) by means of recent scientific studies, case studies, or coverage in the media. Ranging among a diverse array of sensations, including balance, fatigue, pain, the “muscle sense,” and what Maurice Merleau-Ponty termed “motricity,” Paterson’s analysis moves outward from the familiar confines of the laboratory to those of the industrial world and even to wild animals and their habitats. He uncovers important stories, such as how forgotten pain measurement schemes transformed criminology, or how Penfield’s outmoded concepts of the sensory and motor homunculi of the brain still mar psychology textbooks. -/- Complete with original archival research featuring illustrations and correspondence, How We Became Sensorimotor shows how the shifting and sometimes contested historical background to our understandings of the senses are being extended even today. (shrink)

Empruntée à Heidegger et devenue méthode d'histoire de la philosophie, la quête d'un impensé est aussi, chez Merleau-Ponty, ce qui anime et caractérise sa propre recherche. Appliquée à Bergson, une telle méthode dévoile un Bergson se faisant, plus riche et plus complexe que ne le laisse supposer le « bersonisme »; elle révèle en outre des aspects essentiels de la pensée de Merleau-Ponty qu'une référence exclusive à la phénoménologie ne pourrait qu'occulter. Heidegger entliehen und zur Methode der Philosophiegeschichte geworden, ist (...) die Suche nach einem Ungedachten auch bei Merleau-Ponty das, was seine eigene Suche vorantreibt und charakterisiert. Auf Bergson bezogen enthüllt eine solche Methode einen Bergson se faisant, der reicher und vielfältiger ist als der « Bergsonismus » es sonst vermuten läßt; Außerdem bringt sie wesentliche Merkmale von Merleau-Pontys Denken ans Licht, die eine exklusive Bezugnahme auf die Phänomenologie nur im Schatten lassen könnte. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Husserl has been understood along a spectrum running from outright repudiation to deep appreciation. The aim of this paper is to clarify a significant and heretofore largely neglected unifying thread connecting Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, while also demonstrating its general philosophical import for phenomenological philosophy. On this account, the details of a programmatic philosophical continuity between these two phenomenologists can be structured around the concept of motivation. Merleau-Ponty sees in Husserl’s concept of motivation a necessary and innovative concept (...) that we must formulate in order to properly theorize the anonymous and passive functioning of “operative intentionality.” Motivation is the principle that bridges this domain with the egoic life of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s focus on anonymity, bodily habit, and other facets of operative intentionality are thus not a repudiation of Husserl’s analyses of intentionality, but rather a deepening of the notion of consciousness. I conclude by showing how Merleau-Ponty’s early work on motivation lays the conceptual groundwork for his later rethinking of intentionality in terms of institution, and thus mature ontology of the flesh. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty claims that the idea of objective knowledge is supported by "our reveries." My aim in this paper is to explore this argument with respect to the idea of health. As a case study, I focus on bioethical issues surrounding return of results of incidental variants with respect to the use of genetic and genomic screening technologies (GSTs) in newborn and pediatric contexts. Drawing on a range of Merleau-Ponty’s texts, I argue that this case suggests the modern idea of health (...) to turn largely on the desire for control over one’s fate. More specifically, this is a desire for control aimed at assuring that the meaning of one’s life will stay the same as indexed by one’s ability expectations. I term this a desire for existential homeostasis. I further contend that the desire for existential homeostasis is underwritten by multiple sorts of privilege and, insofar as it informs health as a reverie, it is a desire that is particularly apt to contribute to and maintain injustice in both theory and practice. (shrink)

The paper explores what it could mean to speak of love as involving a delight in ‘the simple actuality’ of another, or, as Buber does, of the ‘touchable’ human being as ‘unique and devoid of qualities’. Developing strands in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of perception, it is argued that the relation between recognising this as a particular individual and recognising particular qualities in her may be close to the reverse of what might be supposed: a recognition of this distinctive smile being dependent (...) on a recognition of who this is. The fundamental place of particulars, as opposed to kinds, in our thought about those we know and care for is developed in part through a phenomenological treatment of our perception of faces. That treatment is set in a context of the justification of our judgements about who someone is, and is linked with a critique of treatments of proper names of individuals in the spirit of Frege. It is in our speaking to those we know that we find a relation to a particular that is direct—not mediated by a description of its properties—that Russell sought in ‘knowledge by acquaintance’. (shrink)

This article calls into question recent attempts to move beyond, to ‘post’ phenomenology by highlighting the continued relevance of key phenomenological concepts (intentionality and correlationism) for human geography. I show how these concepts are pivotal to addressing problems raised by post-phenomenologists themselves concerning affects and objects. Drawing on recent phenomenological theory, I develop a spatial account of how subject and object cohere in experience. I argue that the very relation between/entanglement of the human and more-than-/non-human can best be accounted for (...) phenomenologically. Such a phenomenological approach promises new ways of understanding various phenomena such as landscape, weather or climate. (shrink)

[This is a commentary article on Michel Bitbol's TA: "The Tangled Dialectic of Body and Consciousness: A Metaphysical Counterpart of Radical Neurophenomenology".] -/- A summary of the major metaphysical positions reveals them to be variable enough that they do not deny experience to the researcher. Further, Merleau-Ponty’s intra-ontology and related terms are fleshed out.

This essay builds on two questions: the relation of the child with the other and the child’s way of knowing, in which the resistance of the unreflected is not yet problematized. Through a reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Piaget’s idea of the child’s linear intellectual progression toward reflexive abstraction, I highlight the moment of unreflection by taking up the notion of ultra-thing, which Merleau-Ponty borrows from Henry Wallon. These ultra-things are entities with which the child entertains a vague relation and (...) which always remain at the horizon of her perception without yet being possessed in a representation or grasped in a concept. They include, for example, the sun, the sky, the Earth, the body as an object, existence before the birth of the child – uninhabitable dimensions or, to the contrary, ones that are necessarily inhabited. The concept of ultra-thing has not been sufficiently explored in Merleau-Pontian studies and its importance remains underappreciated. This essay thus formulates a hypothesis about the relation between ultra-things and hyper-reflection. (shrink)

The inventiveness of life is at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology because by separating with behaviorism, philosophy could dialogue with the sciences of development to describe several techniques that we successively study as degrees in the normativity of the living : immanent techniques, ecological techniques, bodily intelligence, and, finally, morphogenetic techniques of development. Through this analysis, we demonstrate the thesis of an activation of the living body from its reflex reactivity to its non-intentional projections in its forms.

According to a familiar line of thinking, hallucination reveals that what we take to be direct experiences of the world are in fact mere appearances: appearances which give only mediate and unreliable testimony to reality. If we wish to secure knowledge of the world, we must transition to a different register, that of reason and judgment. In this classical analysis, non-normal perception functions to show the deficit of normal perception. Merleau-Ponty offers a strikingly different account of hallucination. Far from inciting (...) skeptical concerns, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of hallucination in the Phenomenology of Perception in fact leads him to his first sustained account of perceptual faith. Perceptual faith, as our primary bond with the world, is at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s response to skepticism, and it underlies both perception and hallucination. In this article, I show how this surprising analysis of hallucination is possible. (shrink)

Phenomenology is not dead yet, at least not from the viewpoint of the “phenomenology-friendly”approach to the mind that has recently emerged in cognitive science: the “enactive approach” or “enactivism.” This approach takes the mental capacities, such as perception, consciousness and cognition, to be the result of the interaction between the brain, the body and the environment. In this, it offers an alternative to reductionist explanations of the mental in terms of brain activities, like cognitivism, especially computationalism, while overcoming the Cartesian (...) dualism mind-world. What makes this approach so fruitful for a renewed philosophical consideration is its ongoing reference to Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies. It was said to be “consistent with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on virtually every point,” to be the “revival” of phenomenology, even a “Kuhnian revolution.” Evan Thompson argues that this approach “uses phenomenology to explicate mind science and mind science to explicate phenomenology. Concepts such as lived body, organism, bodily selfhood and autonomous agency, the intentional arc and dynamic sensorimotor dependencies, can thus become mutually illuminating rather than merely correlational concepts.” The phenomenological works seem to strike a chord with the enactive theorists. Are we witnessing the dawn of “The new Science of the Mind”? (shrink)

This essay investigates the question of the birth of the subject through Lacan’s and Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the function of the mirror, specularity, and the speculative. The first section draws on the “duplication” of self-consciousness described by Hegel in the first pages of Phenomenology of Spirit. The question of the double and the mirror is then examined through the three main versions of Lacan’s mirror stage, interpreted in light of Merleau-Ponty’s own reflections. Finally, I draw on passages from The Prose (...) of the World and Eye and Mind to illustrate an original convergence with questions raised by Lacan’s late teachings. (shrink)

In Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence, Merleau-Ponty draws on Malraux’s theory, developed in Le Musée Imaginaire and Les Voix du Silence, according to which modern art is the achievement of subjectivity’s creative powers in its ability to achieve the metamorphosis of the world through her works. This essay aims to show that the idea of “coherent deformation” illustrates Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to rethink subjectivity’s individuation as a creative yet ontological pattern that recasts the dynamics of operative intentionality and its (...) expressions. I show that in response to Malraux, Merleau-Ponty works out a diacritical sense of individuation as style that conveys existential possibilities. This conception proposes a “phenomenology from within” that relies on literary, psychoanalytic and artistic works to exhibit the metamorphosis of the subject in and through her world. (shrink)

In Opacidad y relativismo. La situacionalidad del conocimiento en tensión entre Merleau-Ponty y Foucault, Claudio Cormick introduces Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Michel Foucault’s philosophies as attempts to face two possible obstacles for human knowledge : on the one hand, the opacity of consciousness with regard to the foundations of its own positions; on the other, the relative, non-absolute character of our claims to truth, inasmuch as they are formulated within concrete social and historical conditions.

This paper examines the evolution of Edmund Husserl’s theory of perceptual occlusion. This task is accomplished in two stages. First, I elucidate Husserl’s conclusion, from his 1901 Logical Investigations, that the occluded parts of perceptual objects are intended by partial signitive acts. I focus on two doctrines of that account. I examine Husserl’s insight that signitive intentions are composed of Gehalt and I discuss his conclusion that signitive intentions sit on the continuum of fullness. Second, the paper discloses how Husserl (...) transforms his 1901 philosophy in his 1913 revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation, affirming that the occluded parts of perceptual objects are intended by empty contiguity acts. I demonstrate how he overturns the two core doctrines of his theory from the Investigations in these revisions, claiming that empty intentions are not composed of Gehalt and asserting that those acts break with the continuum of fullness. Husserl implements these changes to solve problems that arise from his recognition of two new kinds of intentions; darker and completely dark acts. Finally, in the conclusion, I cash out this analysis, by indicating that, in 1913, Husserl transforms his theory of fulfillment on the basis of his new insights about empty acts. (shrink)

The mediation of the performative body raises the question of the re-evaluation of the lived body in relation to phenomena of re-creation or re-composition involving the sensible and somatic body when it is affected by technology and incorporates its effects. To understand this phenomenon, this essay examines the interrelation of the notions of corporality, corporeality, and embodiment through a transdisciplinary approach and as an anchoring to a dynamic of self-eco-organization. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy underpins the very foundations of this research and will (...) allow us to reflect on the new status of the contemporary body in technological contexts. Two main notions will be used. “Corporeality”, as a form of the lived body and a transdisciplinary concept and embodiment as an act of integration by the body – here in a technological environment. In the evolution of the interrelation between the body and the changing environment, the two are in trans-relation, a trans-formation occurs. To conclude, we propose to analyze these new “realities” in a Merleau-Pontian and Nietzschean interconnected approach, that is, through a philosophy of becoming, a philosophy that flows through the body: being a body, doing, risking and creating – a philosophy that resonates with this trans-formation. (shrink)

Beginning with the relation between the question of Nature and the status of philosophy, this essay interprets the theme of the mirror through the chiasm between multiplicity and thought. This relation is not substantial dualism’s relation of the subject with the object, but rather, following the image used by Merleau-Ponty, it is like the relation between two mirrors facing each other, thus suggesting that the “subject” herself is a multiplicity. From thence, drawing inspiration from this quote in Eye and Mind, (...) “the Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror”, I formulate both the problem of the body and the question of intersubjectivity as a field of individuation for all possible forms of subjectivity. Following this theme, the essay retraces the use of the mirror in the Note on Machiavelli. Finally, given that the theme of subjectivity as a multiplicity is related to the theme of corporeality, the essay ends with an analysis of the idea of the body-mirror which, from an intersubjective point of view, becomes an expressive relation in which each body is mirror and expression of the whole universe, thus unlocking an existential monadology. (shrink)

-/- A concise and accessible introduction to phenomenology, which investigates the experience of experience. -/- This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise and accessible introduction to phenomenology, a philosophical movement that investigates the experience of experience. Founded by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and expounded by Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others, phenomenology ventures forth into the field of experience so that truth might be met in the flesh. It investigates everything as experienced. It does (...) not study mere appearance but the true appearances of things, holding that the unfolding of experience allows us to sort true appearances from mere appearance. -/- The book unpacks a series of terms—world, flesh, speech, life, truth, love, and wonder—all of which are bound up with each other in experience. For example, world is where experience takes place; flesh names the way our experiential exploration is inscribed into the bearings of our bodily being; speech is instituted in bodily presence; truth concerns the way our claims about things are confirmed by our experience. A chapter on the phenomenological method describes it as a means of clarifying the modality of experience that is written into its very fabric; and a chapter on the phenomenological movement bridges its divisions while responding to criticisms from analytic philosophy and postmodernism. (shrink)

The title of this paper makes an obvious reference to Pippin’s book Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part presents Pippin’s conception of Modernity, why it is a philosophical problem, and how two philosophers have responded to it, namely, Kant and Hegel whose position in an attenuated manner Pippin supports. The second part evokes dimensions of Merleau-Ponty’s thought which contest Pippin’s Hegelianism. The third part of the paper offers a different conception of (...) Modernity drawn from the work of Claude Lefort. Lefort’s understanding of Modernity avails itself of aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, in particular: Hyper-reflection and Institution. (shrink)