Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (March 14, 1908 ? May 4, 1961) was a French phenomenologist philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl, and often somewhat mistakenly classified as an existentialist thinker because of his close association with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and his distinctly Heideggerian conception of Being.

Contemporary influence

Merleau-Ponty's work has become classic, in the sense that it is read today in different disciplines, with very different effects.

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Anti-cognitivist cognitive science

Despite Merleau-Ponty's own critical position with respect to science - he describes scientific points of view as "always both naive and at the same time dishonest" in his Preface to the Phenomenology - his work has become a touchstone for the anti-cognitivist strands of cognitive science, largely through the influence of Hubert Dreyfus.

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Dreyfus' seminal critique of cognitivism (or the computational account of the mind), What Computers Can't Do, consciously replays Merleau-Ponty's critique of intellectualist psychology to argue for the irreducibility of corporeal know-how to discrete, syntactic processes. Through the influence of Dreyfus' critique, and neurophysiological alternative, Merleau-Ponty became associated with neurophysiological, connectionist accounts of cognition.

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With the publication in 1991 of The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, this association was extended, if only partially, to another strand of anti-cognitivist cognitive science: embodied or enactive cognitive science.

Related Topics:
Francisco Varela - Evan Thompson - Eleanor Rosch

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It was through this relationship with Merleau-Ponty's work that cognitive science's affair with phenomenology was born, which is represented by a growing number of works, including Andy Clark's Being There (1997), the collection Naturalizing Phenomenology edited by Petitot et al. (1999), Alva Noë's Action in Perception (2004), Shaun Gallagher's How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005), and the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

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References

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Clark, A. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Gallagher, S. 2003. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Noë, A. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Petitot, J., Varela, F., Pachoud, B. and Roy, J-M. (eds.). 1999. Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Feminist philosophy

Merleau-Ponty has also been picked up by Australian and Scandinavian philosophers inspired by the French feminist tradition, including Rosalyn Diprose and Sara Heinämaa.

Related Topics:
Rosalyn Diprose - Sara Heinämaa

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Rosalyn Diprose's recent work takes advantage of Merleau-Ponty conception of an intercorporeality, or indistinction of perspectives, to critique individualistic identity politics from a feminist perspective and to ground the irreducibility of generosity as a virtue, where generosity has a dual sense of giving and being given. See esp. Corporeal Generosity (2002)

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Sara Heinämaa has argued for a re-reading of Merleau-Ponty's influence on Simone de Beauvoir. (She has also challenged Hubert Dreyfus' reading of Merleau-Ponty as behaviourist, and as neglecting the importance of the phenomenological reduction to Merleau-Ponty's thought.)

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For a feminist post-modern critique see also the discussion between Marjorie O?Loughlin and Shari Popen:

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http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/95_docs/o'loughlin.html

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Eco-phenomenology

Ecophenomenology can be described as the pursuit of the relationalities of worldly engagement, both human and those of other creatures (Brown & Toadvine 2003).

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This engagement is situated in a kind of middle ground of relationality, a space governed exclusively neither by causality, nor by intentionality. In this space of in-betweenness phenomenology can overcome its inaugural opposition to naturalism.

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Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine, (Eds) (2003) Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, Albany: SUNY Press.

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David Abram (1996) explains Merleau-Ponty's concept of "the Flesh" as "the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activity." This concept unites subject and object dialectically as determinations within a more primordial reality. Merleau-Ponty himself refers to "that primordial being which is not yet the subject-being nor the object-being and which in every respect baffles reflection. From this primordial being to us, there is no derivation, nor any break; it has neither the tight construction of the mechanism nor the transparency of a whole which precedes its parts."

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Abram, D. (1996) The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than Human World. New York: Pantheon Books.

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See also: Abram, D. (1988) "Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth." Environmental Ethics 10, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 101-20.

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For a bibliography of Eco-Phenomenology see http://www.emporia.edu/socsci/philos/biblio.htm

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