In the following post Adam Robbert does an outstanding job highlighting some of Merleau-Ponty`s main arguments. Adam`s summary and insights are illuminating.
I believe any philosophy that fails to directly reckon with Merleau-Ponty`s work remains in danger of being committed to archaic and distracting conceptual resources. So much of what M-P gifted to us holds potential to lift us out from under the dead stacks of prior philosophical decisions, and provides a bridge between scientific images of humanity and world and our common uncritical conceptions. The open and wide recognition of his significance for theoretical knowledge might just be left for our grandchildren to enact.
In my last few posts, I’ve been working my way through the ideas set down by the late great Hubert Dreyfus. While I end up disagreeing with Dreyfus on a number of issues, particularly on the role of conceptuality in practical action, I still see him as largely setting the terms of the debate. As part of my effort to understand Dreyfus, I’ve been undertaking a parallel study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had a pronounced influence on Dreyfus. Below is a short summary of how I understand a few of Merleau-Ponty’s key insights. (Readers familiar with Merleau-Ponty won’t find too much ground-breaking interpretation in this post, but it does serve to ground the larger investigation I’ve been engaged in.)
His major work, Phenomenology of Perception, was first published in France in 1945. As the title indicates, the work deals with articulating a philosophy of perception. Drawing from his predecessors…
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