Discusses the conditions of possibility for intercultural and comparative philosophy, and for crosscultural communication at large. This innovative book explores the preconditions necessary for intercultural and comparative philosophy. Philosophical practices that involve at least two different traditions with no common heritage and whose languages have very different grammatical structure, such as Indo-Germanic languages and classical Chinese, are a particular focus. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel look at the necessary and not-so-necessary conditions of possibility of interpretation, comparison, and other forms (...) of interaction and how we can speak of similarities and differences in this context. The authors posit that it is necessary to dissolve the question of universalism versus relativism by replacing the ideal language paradigm with a paradigm of family resemblances and that it is not necessary to share a common language to engage in comparison. Numerous case studies are presented, including many comparisons of Western and Chinese concepts. (shrink)

Over the past few years postmodernism has been gaining popularity. Because the works of writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, and Félix Guattari, for example, are now readily available to the English reader, a novel intellectual force is present that must be assessed (Hassan, 1985). Terms such as “mise en abîme”, “libido”, “schizo-analysis”, “undecidables”, and so forth must be explained and their relevance for social analysis deciphered. Furthermore, a conception of knowledge, a research methodology, and (...) an image of social order that are consistent with these somewhat odd ideas have been introduced, and thus must be evaluated with respect to their sociological importance. At first, due to the strange language that is adopted and the nature of the philosophy offered, postmodernism appears to the uninitiated as an attempt to subvert rational discussion. (shrink)

This thesis explores and discusses foundational issues concerning the relationship between phenomenological philosophy and the enactive approach to cognitive science, with the aim of clarifying, developing, and promoting the project of enactive phenomenology. This project is framed by three general ideas: 1) that the sciences of mind need a phenomenological grounding, 2) that the enactive approach is the currently most promising attempt to provide mind science with such a grounding, and 3) that this attempt involves both a naturalization of phenomenology (...) and a phenomenologization of the concept of nature. More specifically, enactive phenomenology is the project of pursuing mutually illuminative exchanges between, on the one hand, phenomenological investigations of the structures of lived experience and embodied existence and, on the other, scientific accounts of mind and life – in particular those framed by theories of biological self-organization. The thesis consists of two parts. Part one is an introductory essay that seeks to clarify some of enactive phenomenology’s overarching philosophical commitments by tracing some of its historical roots. Part two is a compilation of four articles, each of which intervenes in a different contemporary debate relevant to the dissertation’s project. (shrink)

Each thinker, according to Heidegger, essentially thinks one thought. Plato thinks the idea. Descartes thinks the cogito . Spinoza thinks substance. Nietzsche thinks the will to power. If a thinker does not think a thought, then he or she is not a thinker. He or she may be a scholar or a professor, a producer or a consumer, a fan or a fake, but he or she would not be a thinker. Thus, if Heidegger is a thinker, he essentially thinks (...) one thought. What is Heidegger’s one thought? It is neither life nor death, neither me nor you. It is neither technology nor art. It is neither spirit nor language. Heidegger’s one thought is being—or more precisely, the question of the meaning of being. And what is being? Neither presence nor absence--but rather, an ambiguous uncertainty. (shrink)

From the beginning of history sounds have played a fundamentally important role in humanity’s development as ways of expression and of communication. However in contemporary western society, and indeed globally, we are experiencing an excess of speech and a relentless encouragement to expression. Such excess indicates a misunderstanding about what expression and dialogue should be. This condition encourages us to think about silence, solitude and contemplation and the role they might play in restoring the realm of personal understanding of the (...) Self and of one’s authentic experience of the Other. The purpose of this article is to explore the potency of a silence that arises from our participation in the world. We present first some ideas about silence as a human phenomenon. This is followed by an examination of silence and language, an investigation of silence in dialogue, and of its educational implications. The article concludes by emphasising the value of silence as potency in itself, assisting in recovering the expressive powers of language. We argue that it is important to understand the positive status of silence in order to recognise and avoid repressive speech and to introduce its potential for reflective learning. (shrink)

This essay is devoted to calling global attention to body thinking neglected yet routinely practiced by us all, especially in China for millennia. This essay, one, responds to the feature, universality, of disembodyied thinking, by paralleling it with Chinese body thinking, two, shows how basic body thinking is to disembodied thinking, and three, shows how body thinking in China elucidates bodily matters, time, contingency, and bodily death, what Western disembodied cannot handle.

This paper will interpret Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and materialization as a theory of identity, and so put it into dialogue with a phenomenological account of habit formation. The goal is to argue that identity is developed already at a bodily level and that this takes place via the processes of habit formation. The constitution of subjectivity, in other words, requires at the most basic level some kind of bodily performativity. What follows intends to draw out the concept of (...) ‘the body’ in Butler’s work, the role of which is surprisingly meagre given her clear favour of language signification in the elaboration of her theory of performativity. Alternatively, this paper will provide a phenomenology of habit formation that re-introduces the body not as thematic materiality, but as lived materiality. The body will therefore be conceived as something which is already skilful and creative, sensitive and vulnerable, and ultimately, as Butler anticipates, responsive to the intertwinement of individual and social aspects of identity formation. In this regard, I will argue for a performative theory of (bodily) habitual identity. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders certain of Kierkegaard's criticisms of Hegel's theoretical philosophy in the light of recent interpretations of the latter. The paper seeks to show how these criticisms, far from being merely parochial or rhetorical, turn on central issues concerning the nature of thought and what it is to think. I begin by introducing Hegel's conception of "pure thought" as this is distinguished by his commitment to certain general requirements on a properly philosophical form of inquiry. I then outline Hegel's (...) strategy for resolving a crucial problem he takes himself to face. For his account of the nature of thought depends upon the idea of a form of inquiry in which nothing whatsoever is presupposed; but this idea appears basically paradoxical inasmuch as the mere act of beginning to inquire in a certain way embodies an assumption about how it is appropriate to begin. Turning to Kierkegaard, I consider a key objection to the effect that Hegel's strategy for resolving this paradox depends on the incoherent idea of a purely reflexive act of thinking. Finally, I draw out some central features of the alternative account of "situated" thought and inquiry which Kierkegaard presents as distinctively Socratic. (shrink)

This essay examines contemporary liberal theory in light of the 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The objective is both to show the limits of liberal theory, in particular with regard to constituents who do not share liberalism's view of acceptable harm, and to discuss how these limits give us reason to supplement liberal theory with other recourses from critical theory and phenomenology. The essay warns against a bifurcation of law and harm, and (...) instead argues for a pluralization of the possible links between them. To this end, the essay foregrounds what T.M. Scanlon dubs a certain ‘creative instability’, which works to energize liberalism's practice of free speech. The essay tracks this possibility in relation to the plurality and energy intrinsic to the 12 Jyllands-Posten cartoons, and suggests that liberal theory can learn from thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze who focus on the variable impacts and framings of free speech. The upshot is a self-critical theory of free expression, one that links harmful speech to the affirmation of mutual contestation, social equality and respect for difference. (shrink)

This essay interprets the work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch with the help of phenomenological examinations by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Heidegger. Pina Bauschs choreography not only shares basic themes like the everyday, the body, and moods with phenomenology, but they also yield similar results in overcoming traditional dualist frameworks. Rather than being an instrument for expressing ideas, the body is in constant exchange with the natural elements, exhibiting vulnerability and passivity. Moods, in turn, are neither subjective (...) nor objective; this also holds for longing, an essential constituent of Pina Bausch's work. Dance theater and phenomenology, each in their unique ways, are capable of acknowledging and accommodating the ambiguity of our human existence. (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)

There is a long tradition of employing a phenomenological approach to gain greater insight into the unique experience of psychiatric illness. Researchers in this field have shed light upon a distur...

Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs approaches the intentional formation of bodily movement and expression from the various perspectives of individuals who are differently abled. Exploring what it is for a non-dancer to experience various rhythms and movements and spaces with crutches, prosthetic leg, and cane, the essay interweaves phenomenological description and interpretation of suddenly defamiliarized daily activities with discourse drawn from the experiences of professional dancers who are differently abled. The aim is to foreground the opacities, transparencies, and (...) ambiguities of a more general sense of embodied and expressive movement that subtends the abled and differently abled and the non-dancer and dancer, and to acknowledge the lived and living body as the common ground that enables all of our thoughts, movements, and modes of expression, however differentiated their myriad forms and satisfactions. (shrink)

The literature on sensory processing disorders in institutionalized infants highlights the impact of early deprivation on infant perception. Through a Merleau-Pontian, hyperdialectic analysis of the extraordinary development of infant perception under circumstances of severe deprivation the intimate link between environmental affordances and perceptual systems becomes apparent. This paper offers an updated reading of Merleau-Ponty’s late work as a philosophy of systems and outlines some fertile philosophical concepts and methods developed by Merleau-Ponty in The visible and the Invisible. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of (...) the chiasm, understood from a systems perspective, and his method of the hyperdialectic are applied in a child case study of an infant who suffered severe neglect in a Romanian orphanage. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Gestalt theory in The Structure of Behavior is central to his entire corpus. Yet commentators exhibit little agreement about what lesson is to be learned from his critique, and provide little exegesis of how his argument proceeds. I fill this exegetical gap. I show that the Gestaltist’s fundamental error is to reify forms as transcendent realities, rather than treating them as phenomena of perceptual consciousness. From this, reductivist errors follow. The essay serves not only as a helpful (...) guide through parts of The Structure of Behavior for newcomers, but also offers a corrective to recent trends in philosophy of mind. Such influential commentators as Hubert Dreyfus, Taylor Carmen, and Evan Thompson have, I argue, risked serious misunderstanding of Merleau-Ponty’s view, by mistakenly treating “circular causality” as central to Merleau-Ponty’s own acausal view of forms. -/- [The version archived at Philpapers is closer to the author's preferred format. Formatting requirements in the published version make the section/subsection hierarchy needlessly difficult to follow. There are some changes to content in the published version. Please cite only the published version.]. (shrink)

This paper addresses the nature of sensed-presence experiences that are commonplace among the bereaved and occur cross-culturally. Although these experiences are often labelled ‘‘bereavement hallucinations’’, it is unclear what they consist of. Some seem to involve sensory experiences in one or more modalities, while others involve a non-specificfeelingorsenseof presence. I focus on a puzzle concerning the latter: it is unclear how an experience of someone’s presence could arise without a more specific sensory content. I suggest that at least some of (...) these experiences consist in a dynamic and non-localized experience of significant and salientpossibilities. This can amount to the sense of currentlyrelating toa particular individual and, by implication, a sense of that person’s presence. Where an experience of this kind also includes sensory qualities, they are inessential to the sense of relatedness and perhaps symptomatic of it. (shrink)

This paper has two objectives. The first is to formulate a critique of present-day cognitive linguistics concerning the inner workings of the cognitive system during language use, and the second is to put forward an alternative account that is inspired by the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Due to its third-person methodology, CL views language use essentially as a problem-solving activity, as coping with two subproblems: the problem of minimum and maximum, which consists in selecting the appropriate expression out of an unlimited (...) multitude of possibilities, and the problem of the underdetermination of signification. This approach presupposes a notion of an isolated subject and a representationalist view of perception. We defend an alternative view of man's relation to the world in which intersubjectivity is constitutive of embodied subjectivity and which exchanges the representationalist view of perception for a direct nonrepresentationalism. We describe the ensuing view of linguistic action as intra- and interpersonal “all-at-onceness.” This approach dismisses the two subproblems CL implicitly identifies as constitutive of language use. The first is countered by rethinking what it means to be a situated speaking subject and results in the concept of “style.” The second is tackled by opposing the concept of “overdetermination” to CL's notion of underdetermination. (shrink)

Although Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, this paper specifically focuses on his late theorizing of the notion of flesh and its relevance to his late understanding of politics and democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty’s break with Marxism as a philosophical model and with revolutionary (...) dialectics as a political project. It is by showing that such a break was consistently grounded on his theorizing of the being flesh of both the body and of society that this paper shows Merleau-Ponty’s unique contribution to democratic theory and to contemporary political philosophy. In the course of this analysis, it will become clear that in philosophically breaking with the position of a “no that is a yes”—i.e. the model of the revolution, which implies a total negation of the given that becomes a total affirmation of the new order (dictatorship) once in power—he would politically embrace the Weberian “heroic liberalism”—or his “non-communist left”—of parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

: Luce Irigaray is often cited as the principle feminist who adheres to phenomenology as a method of descriptive philosophy. A different approach to Irigaray might well open the way to not only an avoidance of phenomenology's sexist tendencies, but the recognition that the breach between Irigaray's ideas and those of phenomenology is complete. I argue that this occurs and that Irigaray's work directly implicates a Bergsonian critique of the limits of phenomenology.

Luce Irigaray is often cited as the principle feminist who adheres to phenomenology as a method of descriptive philosophy. A different approach to Irigaray might well open the way to not only an avoidance of phenomenology's sexist tendencies, but the recognition that the breach between Irigaray's ideas and those of phenomenology is complete. I argue that this occurs and that Irigaray's work directly implicates a Bergsonian critique of the limits of phenomenology.

A dualistic, discarnate picture haunts contemporary cognitive science of religion. Cognitive scientists of religion generally assert or assume a reductive physicalism, primarily through unconscious mental mechanisms that detect supernatural agency where none exists and a larger purpose to life when none exists. Accompanying this focus is a downplaying of conscious reflection in religious belief and practice. Yet the mind side of dualism enters into CSR in interesting ways. Some cognitive scientists turn practitioners of religion into dualists who allegedly believe in (...) disembodied spirits. By emphasizing supernatural agency, CSR neglects nonpersonal powers and meanings in religion, both in terms of magical thinking and practice and of nonpersonal conceptions of divinity. Additionally, some cognitive scientists of religion declare that all humans are innate dualists. They use this alleged dualism to explain beliefs about both an afterlife and transfers of consciousness. Finally, some call on this dualism to serve a salvific function, trying to salvage some meaning to human life. (shrink)

This article is a critical methodological reflection on the use of interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) initiated in the context of a qualitative research project on the experience of seclusion in a psychiatric setting. It addresses an explicit gap in the IPA literature to explore the ways that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can extend the remit of IPA for noncognitivist qualitative research projects beyond the field of health psychology. In particular, the article develops Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the lived-body, language, and embodied speech, with (...) specific attention to the ethical implications of body and place. It concludes with a discussion on phenomenological reflexivity and prompts a reconsideration of phenomenological methods across a wide range of qualitative research projects concerned with subjectivity and ethical practice, including critical health studies, critical bioethics, and cultural studies that employ a qualitative empirical research design. (shrink)

(2011). The Possibilities and Consequences of Understanding Play as Dialogue. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 46-62. doi: 10.1080/17511321.2010.511250.

Some artistic representations—the painting of a hat in a famous picture by Rembrandt is an example—are able to present vividly the character of what they represent precisely by calling attention to their medium of representation. There is a puzzle about this whose structure, I argue, is analogous to that of a familiar Kantian problem for traditional realism. I offer a precise characterization of the puzzle, before arguing that an analogue for the case of representation to the Kantian solution to the (...) problem for traditional realism is implausible. I offer an alternative solution to the puzzle about representation which also explains why we should be interested in artistic representation in the first place. I close with the outline of a possible realist response to the traditional Kantian problem. (shrink)

Self-mutilation is generally seen only as a negative response to trauma. But when trauma cannot be expressed, other forms of communication become necessary. As gestural communication, self-mutilation can reorganize and stabilize the trauma victim's world, providing a "voice on the skin" when the actual voice is forbidden. This is a plausible extension of Merleau-Ponty's gestural theory of language, and an interesting comment on his notion of "reversibility" as essential to linguistic communication.

This paper sets out to demonstrate that a phenomenological reflection on language highlights the possibilities of authenticity in communication, and as such provides a very necessary complement to the dominant linguistic perspectives: the syntactic and grammatical perspective, Saussurean linguistics, and systemic functional linguistics. While the syntactic and grammatical perspective, which predominates in the educational context, presents language as an institutionalized, authoritarian and self-contained system, Saussurean linguistics provides a view of language as a complex, self-contained, technical system, as such reflecting the (...) nature of modern society. The third perspective, systemic functional linguistics, describes templates of specific genre, models which aid students to construct their own, while simultaneously discouraging individual selfexpression. In contrast, a reflective phenomenological perspective identifies and encourages authentic self-expression. The paper concludes by considering ways to reconcile the impetus in language teaching towards, on the one hand, the language of institutional authority, and, on the other, individual self-expression. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 2 August 2006. (shrink)

This essay outlines how Western culture, and in particular the practice of architecture, has failed to develop a nuanced and ethical approach to alterity. It examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of the flesh as a process of continual self-interrogation through perceptual acts that intertwine communality and difference, establishing a shared world through interlocution, and explores how the work of Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray augment each other to deepen our understanding of alterity. It then examines architectural design as an intercorporeal and intersubjective (...) act that creatively refigures sedimented spatial and social habits. Using the example of an architectural design studio, it demonstrates how designers can critically confront nuances of alterity through investigating the corporeal and social depths of architecture. (shrink)

We argue that all general concepts are family resemblance concepts. These include concepts introduced by ostension, such as colour. Concepts of colour and of each of the specific colours are family resemblance concepts because similarities concerning an open-ended range of colour or of appearance features crop up and disappear. After discussing the notion of “same colour” and Wittgenstein's use of the phrase “our colours”, we suggest family resemblance concepts in one tradition can often be extended to family resemblance concepts in (...) another tradition, illustrated by Wittgenstein's use of the words Spiel and “game”. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty, in his well-known essay, "Eye and Mind," startlingly comments: "A Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror; he sees a dummy, an 'outside,' which, he has every reason to believe, other people see in the very same way but which, no more for himself than for others, is not a body in the flesh." This essay opens up a discourse on this very problem: the question of what one sees when looks at oneself in the mirror. As well, (...) the now-common assumption that we have arrived at a postmodern condition of experience, knowledge, and interpretation comes into question when we consider the possibility that the human sciences have not sufficiently embraced a post-Cartesian perspective on mind, body, self, and vision. The essay closes with a reflection on the contact of the self and the other in vision. The self and the other are not "signs" that are "read" in the context of a perceptual field. Rather, the interpersonal world embodied through the vital flesh of self in communion with other is reflected to the eye only if the observer cares to take note, to imaginatively flesh-out the world embodied in the moment of a thoughtful glance. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that some of the most basic commitments of Kantian ethics can be understood as grounded in the dynamic of sense that Merleau-Ponty describes in his Phenomenology of Perception. Specifically, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s account supports the importance of universalizability as a test for the moral permissibility of particular acts as well as the idea that the binding character of the moral law is given as something like a fact of reason. But I also argue that (...) Merleau-Ponty’s account of reversibility suggests an important dimension of moral experience that is given in the experience of contact and that is underthematized in moral philosophies like Kant’s that emphasize the role of universalizability. Finally, I advance a positive account of moral experience that is centered on the idea of tact as ambiguous imperative. (shrink)

Recent literature on forgiveness suggests that a successful account of the phenomenon must satisfy at least three conditions: it must be able to explain how forgiveness can be articulate, uncompromising, and elective. These three conditions are not logically inconsistent, but the history of reflection on the ethics of forgiveness nonetheless suggests that they are in tension. Accounts that emphasize articulateness and uncompromisingness tend to suggest an excessively deflationary understanding of electiveness, underestimating the degree to which forgiveness is a gift. Accounts (...) that emphasize electiveness, on the other hand, tend to weaken the safeguards that keep forgiveness distinct from condonation, excuse, or mere servility. I argue in this paper that we can do justice to the three conditions by understanding forgiveness in terms of the concept of institution that Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed in his work from the early- to mid-1950s. (shrink)

This article is a continuation of the challenge begun by early phenomenologists of the reductionistic scientism of Natural Science Psychology. Inspired by five distinctions of Emmanuel Levinas, it seeks to bring a deeper interruption of the seemingly unalterable force of mainstream psychology to model itself after the hard sciences. Levinas distinguishes the experience of totality from infinity, need from desire, freedom as self-initiated and self-directed from freedom as invested by and for the Other, active agency from radical passivity, and the (...) said from saying. Five commonly accepted characteristics of science, objective, empirical, causal, reducible, and value neutral, are used to compare three approaches to psychology: Natural Science, Phenomenology , and Psychology for the Other. Using the definition of science, “knowing the phenomenon as it shows itself,” this paper argue that Natural Science Psychology is the least “scientific,” Phenomenological Psychology is more scientific, and Psychology for the Other is the most “scientific” with its ethical command to allow the Other to reveal her/himself. This extravagant but compelling claim is illustrated with descriptions of research and therapy. (shrink)

This article approaches Ovid’s story of Echo and Narcissus in the Metamorphoses through some of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on expression and speech. Echo’s speech as portrayed by Ovid clearly illustrates how Merleau-Ponty describes speech in Phenomenology of Perception as a “paradoxical operation” through which we use words with already given sense and in that very process both stabilize and alter established meaning. Instead of reducing Echo to a moment of the identity and fate of Narcissus, I bring out Echo’s own (...) voice and the expression of her subjectivity through creative repetition. The short dialogue between Echo and Narcissus makes manifest that Echo’s words cannot be reduced to a simple repetition of a clear and distinct original. Rather, her speech emerges in relation to an original that is only made present as an original of a repetition in that very repetition. Echo’s voice is disruption of the words she repeats and each repetition is also its own origin. Echo’s own voice is only made present when we listen to it as something other than a simple repetition of the voice of Narcissus. The fragments she returns through her echo, lose their fragmented character through modifying and altering their already given meaning. What Echo lacks is not primarily a voice of her own but rather an unbound origin which by itself remains mute and thereby runs the risk of not expressing anything at all. Echo is repetition but it is precisely as repetition that she is also originating speech. (shrink)

Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following (...) Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over (...) spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)

In this study the awake patient's intraoperative situation and experiences during regional anaesthetics and surgery are reflected upon by using the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau‐Ponty. Merleau‐Ponty's phenomenological idea of the body as being at the centre of the world highlights the patient's embodied position and bestows significance onto the body as a whole, as a lived body. A case, based on the findings from a previous interview study, is presented as a contextual starting point where a patient (...) goes from having a familiar body recognized as her own to having a partially anaesthetized body experienced as an unknown object. The intraoperative caring space is described in this context as the mutual ground where the awake patient and the nurse anaesthetist (NA) can interact to create meaning. The NA can act as the patient's bodily extension to bridge the gap between the patient's experiences and the situation. This calls for the NA's proximity and genuine presence in order to meet and understand the patient's awake experiences. Learning from the patient's situatedness gives information that is valuable for NAs to share with patients who are less experienced with this contextual situation. The challenge for the NA is not to perform routine‐based care, but to acknowledge every patient's lifeworld and uniqueness thus enabling the patient to move easily along the mind–body–world continuum. The core of intraoperative care is to provide support and promote well‐being of awake patients in the intraoperative environment. The use of a philosophical perspective is relevant for nurses who work in an intraoperative setting where patients undergo regional anaesthetics. This study shows how nursing research using phenomenological philosophy can help uncover new meanings known only to the patients living the experience. (shrink)

The chiasm is usually considered the key notion for Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. I argue against a common conclusion, namely that ‘the chiasm’ is equivalent to ‘reversibility’. Even when the two terms are not taken as interchangeable, the precise nature of their relation has not been adequately established. Focusing exclusively on ‘reversibility’ has implications for a range of philosophical issues, including relations between self and other. The danger of substituting one term for the other is that existential relations are construed as (...) inversions, rather than as genuine exchanges. I examine two trajectories that can be discovered in ‘The Intertwining—The Chiasm’. The first is the inclusion of difference within a peculiar, extended sense of ‘reversibility’. The second is the development of a plurality of expressions, among which ‘reversibility’ is necessary but not sufficient. I go on to argue that Merleau-Ponty secures difference within the chiasm by supplementing the notion of reversibility with ‘imminence’, the idea that something has not yet occurred. I also propose that the figure of a threshold illuminates how the chiasm operates as a transition where both joining and differentiation occur. (shrink)

Caring science that has a foundation in ‘lived experience’ may be viewed as a ‘patient science’, in other words nursing has its starting point in the patient’s perspective. To support in learning caring science, the learning situation has to embrace the students’ lived experience in relation to the substance of caring science. One of the challenges in education involves making theoretical meanings vivid in the absence of actual patients. Written patient narratives and fiction like novels in combination with scientific literature (...) are often used in order to obtain lived experiences as the foundation for teaching. Questions concerning how film can be used in this context to support the learning of caring science have recently emerged. The aim of this study is to describe how film as learning-support may boost reflection when learning caring science. The data was collected through audio-taped seminars, written reflections and group-interviews with students on basic, advanced, and doctoral levels. The analysis is based on the Reflective Lifeworld Research (RLR) approach which is founded in phenomenology. The results show how film as a learning-support enhances the understanding of the caring science theory, and provides a deeper understanding of the subject. Film can be very touching and provides support for the students’ embodied reflections. Hence, it is important that the students are encouraged to watch films from a caring science perspective. This requires a structure for learning-support related to the film, such as having a focus and purpose for watching the film, as well as support for follow-ups. The film itself does not create such support and guidance; instead, it must be combined with well-considered pedagogic thoughts on what learning is and how learning can be supported. The results are highlighted with the help of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of ‘the lived body’, and ‘the flesh of the world’. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 12, Special Edition July 2012. (shrink)

In this paper I address some related aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished texts, The Visible and the Invisible and The Prose of the World. The point of departure for my reading of these works is the sense of philosophical disillusionment which underlies and motivates them, and which, I argue, leads Merleau-Ponty towards an engagement with art in general and with literature in particular. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s emerging conception of ethics—premised on the paradox of a “universal singularity” and concerned with the (...) concrete experience of the individual subject, rather than with abstractions and formal categories—can best be articulated through the formalist concept of “defamiliarization,” the fundamental performativity of all literature, and the dialogic relations which, though inherent in all discourse, become most powerfully evident in the dynamics of reading. (shrink)

By drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of ontological relationality, this article explores what it means to be a ‘we’ in breast cancer. What are the characteristics—the extent and diversity—of couples’ relationally lived experiences of bodily changes in breast cancer? Through analyzing duo interviews with diagnosed women and their partners, four ways of sharing an embodied life are identified. While ‘being different together’, partners have different, albeit connected kinds of experiences of breast cancer. While ‘being there for you’, partners take care (...) of each other in mutually dependent ways. While ‘being reconnected to you’, partners relate to each other through intimacy and sexuality. While ‘being like you’, partners synchronize their embodied daily lives to one another, sometimes up to the point that the self cannot be distinguished from the other anymore. These ways reveal that being a ‘we’ involves complex affective, bodily encounters in which the many fault lines that both separate partners into individual selves and join them together as a unity are continuously reshaped and negotiated. Being a ‘we’ may be understood as something we have to do. Therefore, in being true to the legacy of Nancy, we argue at the end of this article for a sensible praxis of sharing a life and body, particularly in breast cancer. (shrink)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's approach to natural scientific research has unmistakable parallels to phenomenology. These parallels are clear enough to allow one to say confidently that Goethe's delicate empiricism is indeed a phenomenology of nature. This paper examines how Goethe's criticisms of Newton anticipated Husserl's announcement of the crisis of the modern sciences, and it describes how Goethe, at a critical juncture in cultural history, addressed this emerging crisis through a scientific method that is virtually identical to the method of (...) contemporary empirical-phenomenological research in the human sciences. Goethe's practice of science shares with phenomenology a participatory, morally-responsive, and holistic approach to the description of dynamic life-world phenomena. Delicate empiricism has its own version of the phenomenological epoché, and, like Husserl's technique of imaginative variation, it strives to disclose the essential or archetypal structure of the phenomenon through the endowment of human imagination. However, a close reading of Goethe suggests that the tendency amongst some scholars to distinguish phenomenology as human science from the natural sciences is actually a costly error which unwittingly falls prey to implicit Cartesian assumptions. Goethe, however, manages to avoid these problems by performing from the first a phenomenology of nature's sensibility. (shrink)

Human science researchers tend to be targeted for critique on the grounds that their approach is too individualistic to take due cognisance of societal and political influences. What is accordingly advocated is that the phenomenological and so-called romantic theories should be abandoned in favour of analytic or continental theories that have as their main focus the system, the group, the society, and the various influences of the social world on the existential reality of the individual.Without trying to invalidate these social (...) science strategies, this paper attempts to show that it is not necessary to surrender phenomenology in order to understand not only the individual, but also the social world in which individuals live. It is argued that the desired goal of a less individualistic human science’s theoretical basis can still be founded in phenomenology, in that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, which has its origin in Husserlian phenomenology, provides us with an adequate ontology for understanding human existence more comprehensively. Merleau-Ponty’s ontological philosophy elucidates the in-between world, that structure of existence where the individual cannot be separated from her/his world context. In his exploration of the reversibility of existence, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that there is no ontological gulf between the individual and the social world. Instead, the world is ‘in’ the individual as much as the individual is ‘in’ the world. With this phenomenological epistemology, it is argued, it is possible to generate research that is capable “of more than a frozen existence”, as Merleau-Ponty puts it. (shrink)