Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has, from very early on, been labelled a “philosophy of ambiguity” (Ferdinand Alquié, Alphonse de Waelhens). In the early 1950s he encountered different psychoanalytical and psychological concepts of ambiguity and ambivalence (particularly in the work of Melanie Klein and Else Frenkel-Brunswik) that he integrated into his philosophy of ambiguity. This...
I argue that attention is always placed in the lived body-environment as the locus of control of bodily resources, which are activated, oriented, and made manifest as centered in joint engagement there. Since these resources are constitutive of our possibilities for being in the world, it follows that attention is how the self is made manifest in relation to and in engagement with other...
Synaesthesia, in which particular perceptual or cognitive stimuli trigger anomalous secondary sensations, has proven to be remarkably difficult to explain. The way it complicates linkages between perception and action is often taken to present a particularly interesting challenge for embodied accounts of cognition. Taking up Merleau-Ponty’s startling claim that “synaesthetic perception is the...
The main aim of this article is to shed light on the origins of consciousness in the natural world by presenting elements of empirically related interdisciplinary research based on the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl and his followers. The main thesis of this paper is that affections and emotions have a central and foundational role in organising conscious mental life such that...
Large parts of the Western philosophical tradition, powerful in Kant’s transcendental conception, have reserved the concept of autonomy for rational subjects that think and act on reasons. While this captures an essential aspect of autonomy, the dimensions of embodiment and vulnerability remain unreflected or are subsumed under the heteronomous conditions of the human subject. If the conception...
Human StudiesDecember 2, 2024Cătălina Condruz1 citation
Abstract Often understood as a dissolution of the ego, mental illness implies a process of deconstruction where the psychotic faces the most frightening limits one can encounter: the limits of perception, the limits of understanding, the limits of vulnerability, and above all, the limits of intersubjectivity. The present paper aims to explore mental illness phenomenologically, taking it as both...
Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body is often depicted as emphasizing the distinction between the physical and the conscious dimension of the body. This distinction, however, runs the risk of recreating the tension between the physical and the conscious that is at the center of the mind-body problem. In view of this, I argue for a different interpretation of Merleau-Ponty, according to which his...
Human StudiesAugust 1, 2023Masahiro Morioka1 citation
Abstract We sometimes feel the presence of a person-like something on a non-biological object, such as a memento from a deceased family member or a well-engineered, human-shaped robot. This feeling—the sense of someone appearing there—has not been extensively investigated by philosophers. In this paper, I employ examples from previous studies, my own experiences, and thought experiments to...
This paper takes as its point of departure Merleau-Ponty's assertion: "everything will have to begin again, in politics as well as in philosophy". In pursuing his later work, Merleau-Ponty signalled the need for a reconfiguration of his philosophical vision, so it was no longer caught in Cartesianism and the philosophy of consciousness. This required a turn towards ontology through which he...
This paper explores the issue whether feminism needs a metaphysical grounding, and if so, what form that might take to effectively take account of and support the socio-political demands of feminism; addressing these demands I further propose will also contribute to the resolution of other social concerns. Social constructionism is regularly invoked by feminists and other political activists...
Human StudiesApril 6, 2016Kenji Hoshikawa, Michael Staudigl5 citations
In this paper, we propose to analyze the phenomenon of Christian prayer by way of combining two different analytical frameworks. We start by applying Schutz's theories of "intersubjectivity," "inner time," "politheticality," and "multiple realities," and then proceed by drawing on the ideas and insights of linguistic philosophers, notably, Wittgenstein's "language-game," Austin's "speech act,"...