Merleau Ponty In Contemporary Context

This volume presents the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a great philosopher and social theorist of mid-twentieth century, as a viable alternative to both modernism and postmodernism. Douglas Low argues that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy offers explanations and solves problems that other philosophies grapple with, but do not resolve, given their respective theoretical presuppositions and assumptions. Low brings the work of Merleau-Ponty into critical contact with important thinkers, including Sartre, Heidegger, Derrida, and Marx. He highlights Merleau-Ponty's connection to the early Hegel, especially with regard to the criticism of modernism's "representational consciousness" and its subsequent skepticism with regard to our being in the world. Merleau-Ponty made a concerted effort to solve the problems that come about due to a wide variety of Western dualisms: body and mind, perception and conception, self and other, etc. He frequently does so by demonstrating the connection between these disparate terms, the connection of perception with affect and interest, fact with value, and a broadened view of science with moral and philosophical judgment. Merleau-Ponty's unique contribution is his focus on the lived-through perceiving body and its relationship to abstract thought and language. In his detailed analysis of the work of Merleau-Ponty, Low brings attention to a twentieth-century master capable of altering the landscape of modern and social philosophy in the twenty-first century.

This book opens up new dimensions in the philosophical thought of Merleau-Ponty and addresses contemporary issues concerning interpretation theory and postmodernity. In Part I the authors employ the texts of Merleau-Ponty to challenge many of assumptions that operate in the current field of hermeneutics. They find in Merleau-Ponty the outline of a hermeneutics of ambiguity that incorporates his accounts of the human body, language, and temporality in working out the concepts of interpretation, context, perspective, truth, and interpersonal transgression. Merleau-Ponty thus enters into a productive dialogue with contemporary thinkers such as Gadamer, Ricoeur, Habermas, Levinas, and Derrida. Part II engages Merleau-Ponty with the "many voices" of postmodernism. Some of the most able Merleau-Ponty interpreters reveal the richness of his work through variant readings. Can Merleau-Ponty be construed as a postmodern thinker, or as a critic of postmodernism? To what extent can the concepts of flesh, reversibility, and ecart be made to function as deconstructive non-concepts? What can Merleau-Ponty contribute toward a postmodern politics? These essays move the discussion from Derrida to Deleuze, Foucault, and Lyotard.

Merleau-Ponty in contemporary perspective: this was the theme of the conference at the Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K. U. L. ) from 29 November to 1 December 1991. Thirty years after Merleau Ponty's untimely death, it seemed appropriate to bring together scholars from Europe and from the United States of America to reappraise his philosophy. In fact, a significant body of scholarship has emerged which would seem to attest to the continuing importance of his thought for a variety of disciplines within the humanities, the social sciences, and the philosophy of nature. In the present volume, Gary Brent Madison addresses the issue whether Merleau-Ponty can be considered to be a classical philosopher. The fact that his work is one of the highlights of the phenomenological tradition and is of continuing inspiration for researchers in various domains seems to justify that claim. Yet, it is the feeling of many of the contributors to this volume that the so-called "second Merleau-Ponty" is still not really known. The unfinished state of The Visible and the Invisible and the cryptic condition of many of the "Working Notes" may be responsible for that. More research should be done, to uncover "the unsaid" of Merleau-Ponty. lowe to a remark of Paul Ricoeur in his introduction to the work of G. B. Madison, La Phenomenologie de Merleau-Ponty. Une recherche des limites de la conscience (Paris, Klincksieck, 1973, p.

Influenced by Kojève's interpretation of Hegel as well as his direct political experience of the second world war, Maurice Merleau-Ponty abandoned the religious and philosophical position he had assumed in the 1930s and turned to Marxism. This is the first critical study of the French philosopher's political ideas and the context in which they evolved. In its origin and its development, Merleau-Ponty's political thought expressed a subtle dialectic between ongoing political events and the apparent truths of Marx's analysis. With the onset of the cold war, the discovery of the Soviet concentration camps, the repression of Eastern Europe, the Algerian crisis, and the founding of the Fifth Republic, Merleau-Ponty began to take a critical look at Marx's ideas of the genesis of humanism in the light of these disturbing political realities. His reconsideration of the basis of Marxism and his conclusion that it had lost contact with history led to a fundamental reorientation of his attitudes. No longer sympathetic to the use of violence to end violence, he criticized Sartre's external justification of communist violence as 'magical' and advocated instead a new liberalism combining parliamentary democracy with an awareness of the social problems of industrial capitalism. Barry Cooper's study of this important contemporary thinker gives context for an understanding of Merleau- Ponty's politics and, in so doing, brings together the complex issues and ideas that have shaped modern European political and philosophical thought.

Buddhist philosophy of Anicca (impermanence), Dukkha (suffering), and

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.

Philosophers and artists consider the relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for understanding art and aesthetic experience. This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher’s writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining.

This book unites George Herbert Mead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in a shared rejection of substance philosophy as well as spectator theory of knowledge, in favor of a focus on the ultimacy of temporal process and the constitutive function of social praxis. Both Mead and Merleau-Ponty return to the richness of lived experience within nature, and both lead to radically new, insightful visions of the nature of selfhood, language, freedom, and time itself, as well as of the nature of the relation between the so-called "tensions" of appearance and reality, sensation and object, the individual and the community, freedom and constraint, and continuity and creativity.