This paper investigates Alfred North Whitehead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s attempts to develop a historical, dynamic ontology (a “process ontology”, according to the former, and an “ontology of the flesh” for the latter). The claim of the paper is that their originality lies in the methods adopted to reach such ontologies, which show strong similarities. Both authors based their research on nature, conceived of as “the leaf of Being”, and on perceptual experience, understood not as a chaos of bare, punctual, sense (...) data, but as the complex, original source of meaning that constitutes the primary field of philosophical investigation—the only source from which one can gain new understanding of both nature and logos (things, happenings, values, subjectivity, laws, etc.). After some introductory remarks on the connections between Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty, the paper is divided into three parts. The first part clarifies why and how, according to the philosophers, ontology should start from a new scrutiny of nature. The second part specifies what this new conception of nature, based on perceptual experience, is. The third part focuses on how their ontologies must be construed as historic, insofar as behaviors, actions, and practices lie at the core of their concept of being. (shrink)

In Merleau-Ponty's work there is an intimate and reciprocal involvement of socio-cultural and philosophical concerns, more profound and central than Merleau-Ponty himself acknowledged. This gives rise to productive tensions over the course of his works, between the paradigm of perception and an emerging, more culturalist paradigm: language, history, and culture penetrate to the heart of perception, and at the same time the historicity at the heart of perception offers us new ways of understanding the sense and dynamics of the social, (...) cultural and historical fields. The outcome is an outline of an ontology which allows us to think of both nature and culture in new ways and in new relationships. Particularly fruitful is Merleau-Ponty's development of the paradigms of perception and of the life world in the concept of the World, emerging as an original ontological figure, and offering a way of thinking about meaning from our first opening upon it to the cultural world horizon and beyond. (shrink)

This article clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s enigmatic, later concept of reversibility by showing how it is connected to the theme of the genesis of sense. The article first traces reversibility through “Eye and Mind” and The Visible and the Invisible , in ways that link reversibility to a theme of the earlier philosophy, namely an interrelation in which activity and passivity reverse to one another. This linkage is deepened through a detailed study of a passage on touch in the Phenomenology ’s chapter (...) on “Sensing,” which shows how reversibility is important to the genesis of sense, not from some already given origin, but through a creative operation within being, beyond the perceiver, wherein the field of perception internally diverges into active and passive moments. The article connects this point about the genesis of sense to themes in Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and passivity. Altogether the article shows how reversibility is a sign of a divergence and thence of a sort of gap or excess in being that allows for a genesis of sense within being itself. (shrink)

Environmental thinkers often suppose that the natural world (or some parts of it, at least) exists in its own right, independent of human concerns. The arguments developed in this paper suggest that it is possible to do justice to this thought without endorsing some form of metaphysical realism. Thus the early sections look to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception to develop an anti-realist account of the independent reality of the natural world, one, it is argued, that has certain advantages over the (...) accounts proffered by 'environmental realists'. The concluding sections draw upon certain of Merleau-Ponty's later works to defend a rather bolder claim: that the conceptions of realism endorsed by environmental thinkers are not just ill equipped but, in fact, unable to acknowledge what may be provisionally referred to as the more-than-human dimension of reality. (shrink)

Part I of this essay will examine how the interplay between philosophy and art over the past century is reflected in the aesthetic theories of four leading Twentieth century aestheticians: Walter Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, Arthur Danto. The philosophers’ theories are linked to the developments in art most directly related to their respective approaches to problems in aesthetics. Part II will explore selected non-philosophical social and technological developments that are in the process of altering the course of contemporary art today. (...) Among these are globalization, the art market, social/political issues, popular culture, virtual reality, and new manifestations of the avant-garde. Key factors that warrant consideration for future developments in aesthetics are identified in the hope that today’s and future aestheticians will begin to consider what changes are required in aesthetics to address these new developments in art. (shrink)