RESUMO. O romance A convidada, de Simone de Beauvoir, não é ainda a manifestação sensível da moral da ambiguidade propriamente dita. É possível, no entanto, compreender a relação entre alguns conceitos fundamentais que povoam a forma romanesca e a concepção da metafísica moral, tal como Merleau-Ponty a concebe, tanto no ensaio que o filósofo consagrou ao romance, quanto em suas anotações, em O visível e o invisível. A partir dessa relação, destacaremos três momentos distintos e complementares: das imagens negativas à (...) tomada de decisão; as formas abstratas da alteridade e a alteridade concreta; da sedimentação dos conteúdos em movimento à forma da reversibilidade. ABSTRACT: Simone de Beauvoir's novel L'invitée is not yet the sensible manifestation of a morals made up of ambiguities in the strict sense. However, it is possible to comprehend the relationship between some fundamental concepts that abide in the novelistic form and in a conception of moral metaphysics, as these are conceived by Merleau-Ponty in his essay dedicated to de Beauvoir's novel and in his notes on The Visible and the Invisible. From this relationship, we will highlight three distinct but complimentary moments: from negative images to the making of decisions; abstract forms of alterity and concrete alterity; from the sedimentation of contents in movement to the form of reversibility. (shrink)

El propósito de este trabajo es relevar la importancia crucial de las cuestiones de la corporalidad y la percepción para la comprensión de las múltiples lecturas que Merleau-Ponty realizó de diversos aspectos de la filosofía bergsoniana. El análisis se enfoca en los cursos dictados por Merleau-Ponty en 1947-1948, donde el filósofo advierte la ausencia de una verdadera teoría bergsoniana del cuerpo percipiente, a pesar de las equívocas figuras de una percepción y memoria corporales que Bergson expone en Matière et mémoire. (...) De acuerdo con esta interpretación, estas figuras sólo reiteran en otros términos los mismos problemas del dualismo ontológico y el asociacionismo psicológico que se proponen superar. Se releva además la persistencia invariante de los mismos ejes críticos a lo largo de la entera producción intelectual de Merleau-Ponty, y la perpetuación hasta las últimas obras de Bergson del mismo modelo perceptivo “intelectualista” criticado por Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

In recent years, a central debate in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science concerns the role of the body in perception and cognition. For many contemporary philosophers, not only cognition but also perception is connected mainly with the brain, where the processing of input from the senses takes place; whereas for the proponents of ‘embodied cognition’ other aspects of the body beyond the brain, including the environment, play a constitutive role in cognitive processes. In terms of perception, a new (...) theory has emerged which stresses perception’s active character and claims that the embodied subject and the environment, with which it interacts, form a dynamic system. Supporters of ‘enactive perception’ such as Susan Hurley and Alva Noë maintain that the physical substrate or the supervenience basis of perceptual experience and phenomenal consciousness may include besides the brain and the nervous system other bodily and environmental features. Yet, it will be argued in this paper that the interaction between the subject and the environment forms a system of causal relations, so we can theoretically interfere in the causal chains and create hallucinations, which cannot be distinguished from veridical perception, or a virtual reality as in the film Matrix (1999). This kind of argument and its related thought experiments aim to stress the primacy of the brain in determining phenomenal states, and show that the body and certain interactions with the environment have a causal, but not a constitutive or essential role, in forming phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

In Moran, D. (ed.): Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Routledge, 2008.