The overall aim of this paper is to defend the value of the arts as uniquely instructive regarding philosophical questions. Specifically, I aim to achieve two things: firstly, to show that through the phenomenological challenge to dualist and monist ontologies the key debate in aesthetics regarding subjective response and objective judgment is reconfigured and resolved. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s analyses complement and complete Kant’s project. Secondly, I propose that through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological interrogations of the creative process the broader issue of (...) the viability of his relational nondualist ontology is defended against accusations that it has not gone beyond dualism or that it has collapsed into a monism. (shrink)

The original Gallimard edition of Merleau-Ponty’s last-published essay, "Eye and Mind," which was printed as a slim, separate volume containing only this essay, includes a visual preface of seven artworks, chosen by Merleau-Ponty. This essay takes the key assertion of "Eye and Mind"—that rather than seeing depth as the “third dimension,” as seen traditionally, “if [depth] were a dimension, it would be the first one” (180)—and applies it to the reading of these artworks preceding the text. There is an analysis (...) of how and why depth is the first rank in not only rethinking art, but also in rethinking Being itself. The development of the idea of depth as the going together of incompossibles in time and in space is explored by turning to Merleau-Ponty’s texts, beginning with the Phenomenology of Perception through to his last works. The last section of the essay carefully analyses six of the seven visual works of art (omitting Cézanne about whom so much has been written) to see the ways in which they instantiate this new notion of depth as the motive force of art and the heart of the flesh of the world. (shrink)

The election of Donald Trump and the accompanying alt-right fervor of fake news and alternative facts has brought into focus the so-called post-truth era. This paper argues that the term ‘post-truth’ amounts to little more than the mainstream articulation of the postmodern condition, or what Frederic Jameson calls ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism.’ Accordingly, I contend that the post-truth era does not reflect an absence of truth, but rather its inverse; it involves a proliferation of truths. The thoroughly postmodern (...) ‘marketplace of ideas’ has seen truth reduced to a ‘thing’ that can be packaged and sold in order to meet individual preferences. Though this is often veiled as a ‘democratization of truth’, the tendency of markets to manufacture demand has resulted in the production of competing, surplus truths, which are then sold at the lowest, most efficient price possible. I contend that this oversimplification of reality has paved the way for an individual like Trump to assert himself politically. Importantly, such a simplified approach to truth can only occur when we assume that truth is a static ‘thing’ or ‘object’. What this attitude betrays is an underlying ontological commitment to being. In light of this, it is argued that missing from post-truth politics are attempts at understanding. Unlike truth, understanding is taken as a dialectical movement that assumes an ontology of becoming. Through appeals to Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty, it is argued that understanding is much more than an intellectual process by which we come to know things; it is also the mode through which nature produces itself. This becoming of nature can be explained in terms of com-prehension and co-naissance—as literally a ‘co-grasping’, ‘co-birth’ or ‘co-knowing’. In light of this, understanding will be presented as an empathetic alternative to truth and the mode through which we can overcome the stasis afflicting cultural and political life. (shrink)