Abstract

In this dissertation, using the resources of recent work in the cognitive and social sciences and the philosophy of mind, I develop and enlarge Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory of how perceived situations and embodied intelligence interact to guide everyday coping. Philosophers have generally attended to those aspects of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology concerned with perception as a brute sensory contact with the world prior to reflective thermatization. However, my focus foregrounds the role of perception in guiding everyday action, and the interaction of the body "at the heart of the world" with the perceived field as action-milieu. ;One of my principal theses is that the perceptual field is a dynamic milieu of action-structuring saliences enacted by the body's movements through it. I contend that these movements are typically controlled by both the perceived field and the body's active, "on-line" deployment of appropriate forms of embodied knowledge, or what Merleau-Ponty calls the habitual body. I maintain that this latter structure is the body-subject's "generalized power to exist", that is, her prereflective, experience-based capacity to respond flexibly to an indefinite variety of open-ended situations. Drawing on connectionist accounts of embodied knowledge, I argue that such capacities are enfleshed as directly usable or action-ready forms of know-how, the structures of which can be productively transformed in coping with new situations. I sketch a context-sensitive model for how bodily knowledge interacts with the setting to generate improvisational forms of coping, stressing the importance of conscious representations in this process. ;I then broaden this framework by examining how situated actions as projects structure a life or self over long stretches of time. I maintain that just as action over short time spans is structured by conscious representations, so the project-structured self is informed by conscious representations of projects and by narratives or stories about the self. I depart from Merleau-Ponty's framework in acknowledging a central action-structuring role for both conscious representational forms of knowledge, and non-perceived world-side structures, such as institutions