On-line English translation of these 40 short statements of doctrine, mostly concerning ethics.

Prologue : narratocracy and the contours of political life -- From nomos to nomad : Kant, Deleuze, and Rancière on sensation -- The piazza, the edicola, and the noise of the utterance -- Machiavelli's theory of sensation and Florence's vita festiva -- The viewing subject : Caravaggio, Bacon, and the ring -- "You're eating too fast!" slow food's ethos of convivium -- Epilogue : "the photographs tell it all" : on an ethics of appearance.

This paper begins by reflecting on the concept of habit and discussing its significance in various philosophical and non-philosophical contexts – for this helps to clarify the connections between habit and selfhood. I then attempt to sketch an account of the self as ”nothing but habit,“ and to address the questions this raises about how such a self must be constituted. Finally, I focus on the issue of freedom, or liberation, and consider the possibility of moving beyond habit. I emphasize (...) the body since it is through the body that the un-doing of habit must take place. Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty are distinguished from the many philosophers who have recognized the importance of habit by their more radical claim that we not only have habits, but are habits – and for this reason I draw on their work in the first two sections of this paper. (shrink)

The paper suggests that we can usefully approach whiteness through the lens of phenomenology. Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they `take up' space, and what they `can do'. The paper considers how whiteness functions as a habit, even a bad habit, which becomes a background to social action. The paper draws on experiences of inhabiting a white world as a non-white body, and explores how whiteness becomes worldly (...) through the noticeability of the arrival of some bodies more than others. A phenomenology of whiteness helps us to notice institutional habits; it brings what is behind to the surface in a certain way. (shrink)

A noted philosopher and member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Science examines flaws in current understandings about consciousness while proposing a radical solution that argues that consciousness must not be limited to the confines of the brain.

Alphonso Lingis is the author of many books and renowned for his translations of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Klossowski. By combining a rich philosophical training with an extensive travel itinerary, Lingis has developed a distinctive brand of phenomenology that is only now beginning to gain critical attention. Lingis inhabits a ready-made language and conceptuality, but cultivates a style of thinking which disrupts and transforms the work of his predecessors, setting him apart from the rest of his field. This essay sketches Lingis’ (...) phenomenology of sensation in order to give expression to some dimensions of Lingisian travel. As we see, Lingis deploys a theory of the subject which features the plasticity of the body, the materiality of affect, and the alimentary nature of sensation. (shrink)

Charles Taylor; X*—The Validity of Transcendental Arguments, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 79, Issue 1, 1 June 1979, Pages 151–166, https://do.

Charles Taylor; X*—The Validity of Transcendental Arguments, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 79, Issue 1, 1 June 1979, Pages 151–166, https://do.

This essay traces the development of the concept of style in merleau- ponty's thought as both an aesthetic and an ontological category. the importance of this concept is that what merleau-ponty first noticed as the signifying potential of style in painting develops into a general category descriptive of a more comprehensive aspect of our being-in-the-world. style is crucial for merleau-ponty's thought since it provides a way of describing the foundational field of meaning that perception discloses, and also of characterizing the (...) nature of existential coherence under the conditions of finitude. (shrink)

This study undertakes a hermeneutical reading of some texts in which the question of the embodiment of the categorical imperative, the responsibility enjoined by the procedural form of the moral law, is introduced. It is hoped that this reading will contribute to our understanding of the body of experience, the so-called body-subject, showing the body to be not only an object-body, not only, as in the work of Foucault, a material substratum for the application of power, but also, as Levinas (...) thought, the primordial bearer of a certain rudimentary moral compass, at the very heart of which there lies, if only deeply encrypted, the categorical assignment of the moral law. (edited). (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty developed a phenomenology of the body that promoted a non-dualistic account of human existence. In this paper I intend to develop Merleau-Ponty's analysis further by questioning his account of the body on the issues of body perception, and the body's relation to its environment. To clarify these issues I draw from both the phenomenological tradition and recent psychological investigations.

If the a priori is the proper subject matter of transcendental philosophy, then the problems of the a priori are also problems for transcendental philosophy. the idea that defines transcendental philosophy is the idea that there are stable general structures which are discernible in experience, provide the foundations of our knowledge of it, and collectively constitute an a priori which transcends experience and informs it. the a priori is traditionally conceived as a nexus of relations which is held to be (...) logically/temporally prior to experience and responsible for its organization. in this essay, i challenge this traditional (kantian) understanding of the a priori and set forth an alternative to it based on the writings of maurice merleau-ponty. the intent is to provide a new conception of transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

"In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature that most writers on the topic ...

Phenomenology's relation to sensation has many facets. Sensation arises in different contexts in Edmund Husserl's work, and receives several reformulations. This causes us to inquire how the sensations that are unified within the temporal flow by time constituting consciousness, in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, and that continue to exercise an affective pull even after having passed away, in Analyses Concerning Passive Synthesis, can be related to the bodily sensations which constitute the lived body in Ideas (...) II. What is revealed in a critical study of these texts is the unthematized role that sensation plays in Husserl's writings. Yet sensation is not for that reason less significant, nor could his phenomenological descriptions of experience convincingly forgo this concept. ;What is the concept of sensation which can subtend these different formulations and provide a connecting thread within Husserl's phenomenology? My dissertation is a reply to this question. I argue that the sketches of sensation found in Husserl's works can provide the grounds for a rhythmic and dynamic theory of the lived body---a theory which not only inserts the body into the temporal flow of lived experience, and defines its spatiality as fluid, malleable and affectively charged, but which also opens the body to an intersubjective dimension. In this way, sensation becomes a differentiated and heterogeneous reality. Sensation has the structure of an evolution, the continuity of a rhythm, so that the body that is constituted of sensings secretes time at its joints. This theory frees sensation from Husserl's early hylomorphic schema in Ideas I, and reconnects it to the flow of life, and to bodily experiences of world and others. In the process I also examine alternative views which deal with the role of sensation in the contexts of the body, temporality and otherness. The works of M. Merleau-Ponty, but also of E. Levinas, L. Irigaray, H. Bergson and G. Deleuze are important in this regard. Reading these thinkers in connection to Husserl sheds an unexpected light on their philosophies, while allowing us to challenge Husserl and to propel phenomenology in new directions. (shrink)

The relations between the neurosciences and phenomenology enable us today— thanks to the works of M. Merleau-Ponty, G. Simondon, F. Varela, A.R. Damasio and V.S. Ramachandran—to define the brain as a biosubjective organ: its constitution, its functioning, and its interactions prove that a description of individuation can fit in a cognitive neurophenomenology. In this framework, the mental state acquires a subjective autonomy even if it is an illusion in regard to the determining conditions of brain functioning.