Duane H. Davis

The Political Horizon of Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology

I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s account of Being is best understood when we attend to its provenance, situated within the continuous development of his thought over his career. More specifically, we need to call attention to the political horizon of this ontology as it emerged in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, which has received insufficient attention in secondary literature. The impulse for Merleau-Ponty’s ontology develops from his political disagreements with Jean-Paul Sartre, and emerges through several phases: a new philosophy of history, a philosophy of nature, which leads finally to the incomplete ontology of his final works.

A estrutura como representação na obra inicial de Merleau-Ponty

O tema deste artigo, enunciado nos termos mais gerais, diz respeito a relacao de “fundamentacao” entre a fi losofi a e a praxis das ciencias humanas, especialmente a psicologia. Mais especifi camente, eu argumento que a obra de Merleau-Ponty nos fornece uma nocao de estrutura que pode ser vista como representacao em dois sentidos importantes e entrelacados. Em primeiro lugar, sua nocao de estrutura e uma representacao do eu. Em segundo lugar, sua nocao de estrutura e uma representacao da psicologia – especialmente no que diz respeito as suas relacoes com a fi losofi a. Por fi m, eu tentarei mostrar como a estrutura como representacao inaugura o projeto merleau-pontyano de uma fenomenologia da percepcao, que ele desenvolvera por toda sua vida.

Intentionality, indirect ontology and historical ontology: Reading Merleau-Ponty and Foucault together

In this paper we examine the thoughts of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault to help highlight important issues at stake in the questions of the conditions of human knowledge and action, and of the historical character of their occurrence. We argue that each philosopher makes a valuable contribution to the revision of central philosophical assumptions about what is involved in such questions. In this regard, it might appear that we offer a kind of synthesis of the phenomenological and poststructural approaches to philosophy, yet this is not the case. We want to recognise that each position, and any proposed synthesis of them, is open and incomplete, with many unresolved issues. We consider that all this offers an invitation and a challenge to rethink the conditions of human thought and action while making use of a mixture of phenomenological and archaeological-genealogical thinking. Here human embodied experience and changing historical circumstances play a central role. Of crucial importance here, as Carman and Hansen indicate, is MerleauPonty’s commitment to the phenomenological approach to philosophy, while not sticking to the letter of Husserl’s philosophical doctrines. This bifurcation of phenomenological vision has meant that Merleau-Ponty’s open philosophical attitude occasionally has been too sharply pinned down, and it has been subject to regular misinterpretation. One consequence of this has been that the resonance of Merleau-Ponty’s later work with poststructuralist French philosophy has been largely unrecognised. Further, his position has fallen victim to ‘a certain 1970’s interpretation’ when his philosophy was regarded as being somewhat old-fashioned. Merleau-Ponty helps us to gain a critical perspective on the notion of the ‘historical apriori’ introduced by Husserl in the ‘Origin of Geometry’. In the Phenomenology of Perception he develops his account of the nature of man as historical idea rather than as a natural species: