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)

On the phenomenological view, a minimal form of self-consciousness is a constant structural feature of conscious experience. Experience happens for the experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is implicitly marked as my experience. For the phenomenologists, this immediate and first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena must be accounted for in terms of a pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the most basic sense of the term, selfconsciousness is not something that comes about the moment one attentively inspects (...) or reflectively introspects one's experiences, or in the instant of self-recognition of one's image in the mirror, or in the proper use of the first-person pronoun, or in the construction of a self-narrative. Rather, these different kinds of self-consciousness are to be distinguished from the pre-reflective self-consciousness which is present whenever I am living through or undergoing an experience, i.e., whenever I am consciously perceiving the world, whenever I am thinking an occurrent thought, whenever I am feeling sad or happy, thirsty or in pain, and so forth. (shrink)

El presente trabajo aborda el tratamiento del “caso Schneider” que MerleauPonty lleva adelante a partir de los análisis neuropsiquiátricos de K. Goldstein. Esto se conecta directamente con el problema del status que adquiere el discurso científico en un modelo que adopta como marco la fenomenología. Mostraremos que este recurso, lejos de implicar un alejamiento de este modelo teórico, constituye un caso de reducción a la experiencia de sujetos cuyo “arco intencional” se presenta distendido y están, por ello, en condiciones de (...) ofrecer datos equiparables a los que se obtienen al amparo de la reducción fenomenológica.This paper addresses the treatment of the Schneider’s case that Merleau-Ponty accomplished from the neuropsychiatric analysis of K. Goldstein. This issue is directly connected with the problema of the status of scientific discourse into a model that adopts a phenomenological framework. It will be shown that this resource, far from implying a departure from this theoretical model, is a case of reduction to the experience of subjects whose “intentional arch” appears relaxed and are therefore able to provide data comparable to those obtained under phenomenological reduction. (shrink)

Despite the recent increase of interest in the work of Merleau-Ponty there is still a persistent tendency to overlook the uniqueness of the philosophical position he advances in Phenomenology of Perception. In this article I present a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the phenomenological reduction that explains how it is original. I do this by contrasting his presentation of the reduction with that of the early Husserl, highlighting how his emphasis on the phenomenology of the ‘perceived world’ leads him to (...) reject Husserl’s conception of phenomenology as a ‘philosophical science,’ and the Kantian language in which the this account is framed. I go on to critically discuss the interpretations of the reduction advanced by Stephen Priest and Joel Smith as examples of readings that fail to fully grasp Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ‘natural attitude’ as resting on the inherent objectivizing structure that is built into perception itself. The way that these authors misinterpret Merleau-Ponty helps to make maximally clear the profound philosophical significance that he places on the phenomenology of the ‘perceived world’. (shrink)

The enactive approach offers a distinctive view of how mental life relates to bodily activity at three levels: bodily self-regulation, sensorimotor coupling, and intersubjective interaction. This paper concentrates on the second level of sensorimotor coupling. An account is given of how the subjectively lived body and the living body of the organism are related via dynamic sensorimotor activity, and it is shown how this account helps to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and the brain. Arguments by O'Regan, Noë, and (...) Myin that seek to account for the phenomenal character of perceptual consciousness in terms of ‘bodiliness’ and ‘grabbiness’ are considered. It is suggested that their account does not pay sufficient attention to two other key aspects of perceptual phenomenality: the autonomous nature of the experiencing self or agent, and the pre-reflective nature of bodily self-consciousness. (shrink)

Phenomenology has proved to be a popular methodology for nursing research. I argue, however, that phenomenological nursing research could be strengthened by greater attention to its philosophical underpinnings. Many research reports devote more page space to procedure than to the philosophy that purportedly guided it. The philosophy of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty is an excellent fit for nursing, although his work has received less attention than that of Husserl and Heidegger. In this paper, I examine the life and thought of Merleau‐Ponty, with (...) emphasis on concepts, such as perception, intentionality and embodiment, which have particular relevance to the discipline of nursing. (shrink)

We ordinarily think that self and other coexist as subjects with mutually exclusive mental lives. The conceptual problem of other minds challenges this common thought by raising doubts that coexistence and mutual exclusivity come together in a coherent idea of others. Existential phenomenology is usually taken to be exempt from skeptical worries of this sort because it conceives of subjects as situated or embodied, offering an inclusive account of coexistence. I submit that this well-entrenched view faces a serious dilemma: either (...) the ordinary distinction between self and other has to be given up, or accounts of situated and embodied coexistence presuppose a non-phenomenological solution to (a close relative of) the conceptual problem of other minds. I then propose a way out for existential phenomenology by sketching a Sartre-inspired phenomenological response to the problem. (shrink)

This paper suggests that during severe and prolonged traumatic experiences such as trauma type II, one may develop disownership toward the entire body. In this situation one’s body becomes a pure object and as such an integral part of the hostile environment. This article applies Merleau-Ponty’s approach to perception in order to improve our understanding of this process.

This paper draws on a phenomenological study of students’ experience of the demands of a module, Reading and Writing Academic Texts, designed with the specific aim of developing students’ academic literacy. This module is a core, compulsory component of the mixed-mode Bachelor of Education Honours programme offered by the School of Education and Development at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. The study thus foregrounds issues of language and literacy, and is contextualized within a “distance” model of (...) teacher education.The paper proceeds with a brief focus on teacher education through “distance” and the role and nature of this form of pedagogical delivery. It then engages directly with phenomenology and the relevance of a phenomenological sensitivity to pedagogical contexts. In order to demonstrate the type of process that can nudge phenomenological sensitivity into being, two aspects of the phenomenological research process that shaped this study – namely, identifying the phenomenon under study, and the phenomenological interview – are presented. The paper concludes with an explanation of the type of data analysis used, and examples of its application in this study. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Merleau-Ponty reformulates traditional transcendental philosophy in the sense of showing that the a priori conditions of experience cannot be separated from the concrete experiences. In the first section, I revisit Kant and Husserl, to show how these authors delimit the transcendental conditions as a formal domain independent from any concrete experience. Then I reconstruct the argumentative move through which Merleau-Ponty rejects this formal delimitation of the transcendental sphere and reintroduces it as inseparable from empirical (...) domain, initially in The Structure of Behavior and later in Phenomenology of Perception. (shrink)