ABSTRACTThe central hypothesis of this paper is that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty offers significant philosophical groundwork for an ethics that honours key feminist commitments – embodiment, situatedness, diversity and the intrinsic sociality of subjectivity. Part I evaluates feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. Part II defends the claim that Merleau-Ponty’s non-dualist ontology underwrites leading approaches in feminist ethics, notably Care Ethics and the Ethics of Vulnerability. Part III examines Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodied percipience, arguing that these offer a powerful critique of the (...) view from nowhere, a totalizing God’s-eye-view with pretensions to objectivity. By revealing the normative structure of perceptual gestalts in the intersubjective domain, he establishes the view from everywhere. Normativity is no longer deferred to higher authorities such as duty, utility or the valorized virtue, but through the perceptual gestalt it is returned to the perceiving embodied subject. This... (shrink)

Thanks in large part to the record of scholarship fostered by Hypatia, feminist philosophers are now positioned not just as critics of the canon, but as innovators advancing uniquely feminist perspectives for theorizing about the world. As relatively junior feminist scholars, the five of us were called upon to provide some reflections on emerging trends in feminist philosophy and to comment on its future. Despite the fact that we come from diverse subfields and philosophical traditions, four common aims emerged in (...) our collaboration as central to the future of feminist philosophies. We seek to: 1) challenge universalist and essentialist frameworks without ceding to relativism; 2) center coloniality and embodiment in our analyses of the intermeshed realities of race and gender by shifting from oppression in the abstract to concrete cosmologies and struggles, particularly those of women of color and women of colonized communities across the globe; 3) elaborate the materialities of thought, being, and community that must succeed atomistic conceptions of persons as disembodied, individually constituted, and autonomous; 4) demonstrate what is distinctive and valuable about feminist philosophy, while fighting persistent marginalization within the discipline. In our joint musings here, we attempt to articulate how future feminist philosophies might advance these aims, as well as some of the challenges we face. (shrink)

Phenomenology is considered a philosophy of experience. But in the wake of French post-structuralism beginning in the 1970s, the concept of experience within phenomenology has fallen under heavy critique. Even today, in the context of feminist philosophy the phenomenological concept of experience has yet to recover from the poststructuralist critique. In this article, I will closely examine the poststructuralist critique of the concept of experience within the context of feminist theory. I will thereby refer first and foremost to the poststructuralist (...) theorist Joan Scott, and her influential text “'Experience'”. In my examination of the poststructuralist critique of experience, the leading question will be whether or not this critique, down to its details, can in fact be applied to phenomenology. My thesis is that phenomenology is able to withstand the poststructuralist critique of experience. Further, I will argue that post-structuralism and phenomenology have more in common as regards the concept of experience than is usually admitted. For several reasons, it seems - as I will maintain - that both poststructuralist feminism and phenomenology are equally interested in a strong concept of experience and thus do not promote doing away with the concept. (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)

This article stages a new encounter between rhetoric and the philosophy of Karl Marx. We argue that the configuration of two major tropes in Marx’s 1852 pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte renders explicit the operative but implicit logics of Marxian historical materialism. Our reading therefore makes available a novel and untimely dimension of Marx’s conceptual labor where we least expect to find it: in a text that has been largely, but not exclusively, understood as a history of counterrevolution (...) that was meant to intervene within its own context in particular ways. While we do not wish to lose sight of that context, our aim is to demonstrate that The Eighteenth Brumaire is suggestive of the.. (shrink)

In 1930 Husserl wrote that phenomenology is ‘a transcendental idealism that is nothing more than a consequentially executed self-explication in the form of an egological science, an explication of my ego as subject of every possible cognition, and indeed with respect to every sense of what exists, wherewith the latter might be able to have a sense for me, the ego.’ In transcendental-phenomenological theory, according to Husserl, ‘every sort of existent itself, real or ideal, becomes understandable as a “product” of (...) transcendental subjectivity, a product constituted in just that performance.’ This appears so inimical to the fundamental bases of feminist theory that the question of the very possibility of a ‘feminist phenomenology’ inevitably arises, not least because so much associated with the contributions of feminist theory to philosophy concern precisely the critique of the transcendental, isolated, disembodied subject. This chapter explores the different kinds of feminist phenomenology of pregnancy and birth with this problem in mind. Although phenomenology has developed and transformed itself in ways more accommodating to feminist theory we are still entitled to ask what makes it phenomenology? What are the presuppositions of any feminist phenomenology if it is still to count as phenomenology, rather than descriptive social-psychology or feminist metaphysics or feminist ethics? Is phenomenology essentially tied to first-personal description, or can third-person accounts be a legitimate part of its analyses? If third-person descriptions are accepted as a legitimate, what considerations govern the inevitable interpretative aspect of their analysis? Can there be any phenomenology, feminist or otherwise, without some conception of transcendental subjectivity? And what is at stake in the continued use of the transcendental problematic, granted its immanent phenomenological criticism and its various theoretical transformations? This chapter addresses the question of the philosophical specificity of feminist phenomenology by pursuing its distinction from the use of phenomenological research methods in practice disciplines and qualitative psychology, via two of the pivotal questions raised above: can there be any phenomenology, feminist or otherwise, without some conception of transcendental subjectivity? And what is the role of third person testimony in phenomenology? I will argue that the first of these questions remains a problem for feminist phenomenology, in a way that is not easily solved with recourse to third person testimony, the use of which remains under-theorized in the feminist phenomenological literature. Finally, I will show how the problem of transcendental subjectivity is particularly acute for the feminist phenomenology of pregnancy and birth when we consider the generative metaphorics of its philosophical origin in Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

The current medical approach to erectile dysfunction (ED) consists of physiological, psychological and social components. This paper proposes an additional framework for thinking about ED based on phenomenology, by focusing on the theory of sexual projection. This framework will be complementary to the current medical approach to ED. Our phenomenological analysis of ED provides philosophical depth and illuminates overlooked aspects in the study of ED. Mainly by appealing to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, we suggest considering an additional etiology of ED (...) in terms of a weakening of a function of sexual projection. We argue that sexual projection can be problematized through cognitive interferences, changes in the ‘intentional arc’, and modifications in the subject’s ‘body schema’. Our approach further highlights the importance of considering the ‘existential situation’ of patients with ED. We close by reflecting briefly on some of the implications of this phenomenological framework for diagnosis and treatment of ED. (shrink)

This introductory article is structured around the following themes: it begins with a brief overview of some important works that have paved the way for the present discussion. This is followed by a critique of the concept of “experience” and the philosophies based on it, that was first presented by feminist thinkers Joan Scott and Judith Butler in the 1980’s. The question this debate poses to the discussions in this book is whether focusing on experience is still a philosophically viable (...) option. After that, the views of Edmund Husserl – often described as “the father of phenomenology” – are presented on the particular themes of motherhood and pregnancy, as it is often overlooked that he had anything to say on the topic. Then follows a short outline of the structure of the experience of pregnancy, and also the modest suggestion that pregnancy should be seen not only as “split subjectivity” but also as a specific mode of phenomenological “in-between.” Thereafter the question is taken up whether pregnancy as a philosophical topic might also affect the methodological core of phenomenology. The article ends with a speculative outlook towards certain themes that have developed as a consequence of thinking pregnancy philosophically. (shrink)

In his later works, Merleau-Ponty proposes the notion of ‘the flesh’ (la chair) as a new ‘element’, as he put it, in his ontological monism designed to overcome the legacy of Cartesian dualism with its bifurcation of all things into matter or spirit. Most Merleau-Ponty commentators recognise that Merleau-Ponty's notion of ‘flesh’ is inspired by Edmund Husserl's conceptions of ‘lived body’ (Leib) and ‘vivacity’ or ‘liveliness’ (Leiblichkeit). But it is not always recognised that, for Merleau-Ponty, the constitution of the world (...) of perception, the problem of embodiment or incarnation, is at the very same time one with the problem of the experience of others in what Husserl called Einfühlung or Fremderfahung and indeed one with the problem of the constitution of the commonly shared world ‘for all’. As Merleau-Ponty put it in his late essay ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ in Signs, ‘the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being, or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there’. In other words, the problem of the apprehension of the other is part of the overall apprehension of the transcendent world. In this paper I want to meditate on the relations between embodiment, experience of others, and experience of the world in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I will take particular note, as in the title of this presentation, of the claim made by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible that ‘there is no brute world, only an elaborated world’ (il n'y a pas de monde brut, il n'y a qu'un monde élaboré). (shrink)

In this paper I highlight the significance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to the study of teacher learning. I particularly draw on his notion of embodiment to show that professional knowledge is embodied knowledge and that teachers make sense of their professional world through their embodied action. I contrast my interpretation with a professional learning model that has been influential in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia and other countries. I suggest that policy makers interested in education reform initiatives would benefit (...) from interrogating the nature of professional practices in education. (shrink)

This paper briefly explores Merleau-Ponty's notions of ‘body subject’ and ‘flesh’ in order to draw out some of the implications of his work for an understanding of key aspects of non-Western worldviews, notably that of Australian aboriginal people. Focusing specifically on the concept of materiality, I argue that its elaboration as flesh in Merleau-Ponty's work constitutes an important conceptual link with non-atomistic accounts of being and world, accounts characteristic of some indigenous peoples. Writing as a non-aboriginal and a relative newcomer (...) to the study of aboriginal beliefs, I address the issue of possible contributions such understandings may make to solutions to problems we face in future both as individuals and as educators. (shrink)