Merleau-Ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy

Merleau-Ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy PDF Author: Bernard Flynn
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438426917
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Maurice Merleau-Ponty is arguably the preeminent French philosopher of the last century, and interest in his thought is growing exponentially. This volume celebrates and interrogates the thought of Merleau-Ponty by drawing upon both classic and state-of-the-art assessments, some available in English here for the first time. The result is an essential collection of essays that explore Merleau-Ponty's importance in terms of his originality vis-à-vis the philosophical tradition, and examine his major insights about such contemporary concerns as subjectivity, the question of the other and sociality, the natural and the human, art, the sensible and the intelligible, and the philosophical study of language. Penetrating and illuminating, these essays firmly install Merleau-Ponty among the most innovative and critically debated thinkers of the past half century.

Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy

Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy PDF Author: Lawrence Hass
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253351197
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
A clear and comprehensive introduction to the thought of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The Possibility of Philosophy

The Possibility of Philosophy PDF Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810144557
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
The Possibility of Philosophy presents the notes that Maurice Merleau‐Ponty prepared for three courses he taught at the Collège de France: “The Possibility of Philosophy Today,” given in the spring semester of 1959, and “Cartesian Ontology and Ontology Today” and “Philosophy and Nonphilosophy since Hegel,” both given in the spring semester of 1961. The last two courses remain incomplete due to Merleau-Ponty’s unexpected death on May 3, 1961. Nonetheless, they provide indications of the new ontology that informed The Visible and the Invisible, a posthumously published work that was under way at the same time. These courses offer readers of Merleau‐Ponty’s late thought a wealth of references—to painting, literature, and psychoanalysis, and to the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Descartes, Hegel, and Marx—that fill in some of the missing pieces of The Visible and the Invisible, especially its often terse and sometimes cryptic working notes. We see more clearly how Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to bring forth a new ontology indicates a fundamental revision in what it means to think, an attempt to reimagine the possibility of philosophy.

Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy

Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy PDF Author: Emmanuel Alloa
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438476922
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The recent publication of his lecture courses and posthumous working notes has opened new avenues for both the interpretation of his thought and philosophy in general. These works confirm that, with a surprising premonition, Merleau-Ponty addressed many of the issues that concern philosophy today. With the benefit of this fuller picture of his thought, Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy undertakes an assessment of the philosopher's relevance for contemporary thinking. Covering a diverse range of topics, including ontology, epistemology, anthropology, embodiment, animality, politics, language, aesthetics, and art, the editors gather representative voices from North America and Europe, including both Merleau-Ponty specialists and thinkers who have come to the philosopher's work through their own thematic interest.

The Prose of the World

The Prose of the World PDF Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810106154
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
The work that Maurice Merleau-Ponty planned to call The Prose of the World, or Introduction to the Prose of the World, was unfinished at the time of his death. The book was to constitute the first section of a two-part work whose aim was to offer, as an extension of his Phenomenology of Perception, a theory of truth. This edition's editor, Claude Lefort, has interpreted and transcribed the surviving typescript, reproducing Merleau-Ponty's own notes and adding documentation and commentary.

Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature

Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature PDF Author: Ted Toadvine
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810125986
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
In our time, Ted Toadvine observes, the philosophical question of nature is almost entirely forgotten—obscured in part by a myopic focus on solving "environmental problems" without asking how these problems are framed. But an "environmental crisis," existing as it does in the human world of value and significance, is at heart a philosophical crisis. In this book, Toadvine demonstrates how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has a special power to address such a crisis—a philosophical power far better suited to the questions than other modern approaches, with their over-reliance on assumptions drawn from the natural sciences. The book examines key moments in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature while roughly following the historical sequence of his major works. Toadvine begins by setting out an ontology of nature proposed in Merleau-Ponty’s first book, The Structure of Behavior. He takes up the theme of the expressive role of reflection in Phenomenology of Perception, as it negotiates the area between nature’s own "self-unfolding" and human subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of "intertwining" and his account of space provide a transition to Toadvine’s study of the philosopher’s later work—in which the concept of "chiasm," the crossing or intertwining of sense and the sensible, forms the key to Merleau-Ponty’s mature ontology—and ultimately to the relationship between humans and nature.

Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism

Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism PDF Author: Rajiv Kaushik
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438476779
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Merleau-Ponty says in his Institution and Passivity lectures that he wants to "consider criticism itself as a symbolic form" instead of doing "a philosophy of symbolic form." This invites the possibility of an unconventional thought: If critical philosophy is a symbolic form, it cannot disclose its own limits and is, in fact, uncritical. Furthermore, the symbolic form can never itself be thought according to the terms of the criticism it produces but is always only constellated and matrixed within them—a symbolic form within both reflection and what it reflects on, within consciousness and the world. Thus, as Rajiv Kaushik argues, the symbolic form is another name for what Merleau-Ponty calls ontological divergence. Only now divergence introduces the question of a limit to both the subject and philosophy itself. This is nothing less than a psychoanalysis of philosophy. Kaushik's analyses of the matrices between space—imagination, light—dark, awake—asleep, and repression—expression reveal this symbolism in its form of divergence, its lack of origin and destination. Kaushik also argues that the phenomenology of symbolism must detour from the purely descriptive method. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty's recently published course materials, and attentive to his reliance on literature and literary language, Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism continues the living force of Merleau-Ponty's thought and develops his radical insight of the primacy of the symbolic form, even in an ontology that claims to be about the sensible and its elements.

In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays

In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays PDF Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810107961
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays explores Lavelle, Bergson, and Socrates and provides themes from Merleau-Ponty lectures at the Collége de France including “The Problem of Speech” and “Nature and Logos: The Human Body.”

The Thinking of the Sensible

The Thinking of the Sensible PDF Author: Mauro Carbone
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810119862
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
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 Uexküll, 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.

Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World

Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World PDF Author: Galen A. Johnson
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823288145
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Merleau-Ponty has long been known as one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics, yet most discussions of his aesthetics focus on visual art. This book corrects that balance by turning to Merleau-Ponty's extensive engagement with literature. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of “sensible ideas,” from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as “co-naissance,” from Valéry came “implex” or the “animal of words” and the “chiasma of two destinies.” Literature also provokes the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontian poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, the book argues, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. Ultimately, theoretical figures or “figuratives” that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.