Several commentators have argued that with his concept of anonymity Merleau-Ponty breaks away from classical Husserlian phenomenology that is methodologically tied to the first person perspective. Many contemporary commentators see Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity as a break away from Husserl’s framework that is seen as hopelessly subjectivistic and solipsistic. Some judge and reproach it as a disastrous misunderstanding that leads to a confusion of philosophical and empirical concerns. Both parties agree that Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of anonymity mark a divergence from classical (...) Husserlian phenomenology. I will question this view and demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity remains Husserlian in two important senses: it analyses senses in terms of constituting selves and communities of such selves, and it accounts for the formation of experience by the temporal sedimentation of intentional activity. The argument proceeds in four steps. The first section argues against the widely spread notion according to which Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous subject is collective. In the second section, I offer an alternative reading by demonstrating that Merleau-Ponty uses the term “anonymous” primarily to characterize the lived body of a personal subject. In section three, I introduce Merleau-Ponty’s idea of trace and show that for him both the perceived thing and the perceiving body are traces and as such refer to earlier constitutive acts of alien subjects. I then argue that Husserl’s concepts of sedimentation are crucial for the understanding of this idea. Finally, in section four, I show how Husserl’s theory of depresentation informs Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity. (shrink)

Context: Varela’s neurophenomenology was conceived from the outset as a criticism and dissolution of the “hard problem” of the physical origin of consciousness. Indeed, the standard (….

In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty develops a notion of ‘sensible ideas’ that conceives general meaning as inseparable from its realization in sensible particulars. Such ideas – exemplified by music – are to capture the specificity of the meaning produced by embodied agency and serve as the foundation of all cognition. This article argues that, although Merleau-Ponty overgeneralizes their application, sensible ideas are philosophically important in enabling better understanding of the diverse forms and functions embodied-embedded practices and cognition can (...) take. It begins by outlining Merleau-Ponty’s conception of sensible ideas and showing how this late ‘ontological’ view takes up and refines themes from his earlier works. It then assesses sensible ideas’ assumed foundational role by considering several embodied practices (mathematics, music, painting), arguing that this does not hold generally and that painting better exemplifies sensible ideas than music. I show that whether a practice is accurately described by sensible ideas depends on how it relates the particular and general, and that sensible ideas have a distinctive philosophical role in understanding the non-identity-based meaning constitution characteristic of some embodied-embedded practices. Finally, a comparison with Kant’s aesthetic ideas is used to clarify the close but non-necessary relation between sensible ideas and art. (shrink)

I examine the role of mutual gaze in social cognition. I start by discussing recent studies of joint visual attention in order to show that social cognition is operative in infancy prior to the emergence of theoretical skills required to make judgments about other people's states of mind. Such social cognition depends on the communicative potential inherent in human bodies. I proceed to examine this embodied social cognition in the context of Merleau-Ponty's views on vision. I expose some inner difficulties (...) within Merleau-Ponty's position as well as to point out the ways of resolving them by means of combined insights from developmental psychology and the analyses of self-other relations from philosophies of dialogue. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article I examine Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the relation between literature, being and perception. I focus especially on two of Merleau-Ponty’s courses at Collège de France:...

Claude Lefort’s theory of democratic indeterminacy has been an influential source among democratic theorists to demonstrate that democratic times lack absolute and determinate grounds on which to b...

This paper analyzes, from the opposition of the Cartesian notion of the mechanics of light and the idea of vision as distance possession developed by Merleau-Ponty, the criticism of philosophical modernity and its general paradigms of the centrality of reason. It is, strictly speaking, two distinct conceptions of sensitivity: one associated with mechanics, the other with existence. According to Merleau-Ponty, light as a movement of particles and corpuscles does not account for vision as the subject's installation in a mundane situation. (...) More than that, the contemporary conception of vision allows, among other things, to deal with the problem of the substantial union of body and soul, overcoming the impasses that even modern philosophy has not been able to answer. (shrink)

Resumen El artículo parte del supuesto que Merleau-Ponty realiza en su filosofía una formulación y caracterización del conocimiento humano. Se explican cuatro notas que dan cuenta, no exhaustiva, de los rasgos centrales de su pensamiento gnoseológico. La característica principal, de la que se desprenden las otras tres notas, es la primacía de la percepción. La segunda nota, que dice relación con la opacidad del conocimiento, se explica tomando una expresión de Bech: “el pensamiento de la no-coincidencia”. La tercera nota corresponde (...) a la interrogación radical y la cuarta se expone a través del concepto de no-filosofía.The article starts from the assumption that Merleau-Ponty, in hisphilosophy, formulates and characteriges human knowledge. Four traits are explained, each of which gives account, in a non-exhaustive way, of hisgnoseological thinking centralfeatures. The main feature, from which emerge the other three, is the primay of perception. The second feature, which is related to the opaaty of knowledge, is explained by Bech ’s expression of “the thought of non-coincidence”. The third feature corresponds to radical interrogation and the fourth is explained through the concept of non-philosophy. (shrink)

Resumo: O problema da intersubjetividade, tal como colocado pela filosofia da consciência, exigiu de Merleau-Ponty uma investigação de alguns aspectos essenciais envolvidos no fenômeno da comunicação, tais como o valor expressivo da palavra e a questão da verdade, o que acabou por inserir o filósofo no cenário das grandes discussões linguísticas. Pelo aprofundamento especulativo em direção à camada pré-reflexiva da existência, a análise da linguagem e da intersubjetividade favoreceram não apenas a compreensão da questão da criação de novos significados: ela (...) também possibilitou uma autêntica experiência de comunicação. Foi pela realização desse estudo que o filósofo radicalizou seu pensamento em direção a uma ontologia indireta, afastando-se da noção de cogito tácito como condição de possibilidade da experiência intersubjetiva. O objetivo desse artigo é acompanhar esse percurso realizado por Merleau-Ponty na década de 1950, a fim de evidenciar a relação entre o fenômeno da criação no domínio da linguagem e a possibilidade da experiência intersubjetiva. Palavras-chave: criação; intersubjetividade; linguagem; verdade. (shrink)