Merleau-Ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy : Transforming the Tradition

by Flynn, Bernard; Froman, Wayne J.; Vallier, Robert

• ISBN13: 9781438426693
• ISBN10: 1438426690
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-07-09
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is arguably the preeminent French philosopher of the last century, and interest in his thought is growing exponentially. This volume celebrates and interrogates the thought of Merleau-Ponty by drawing upon both classic and state-of-the-art assessments, some available in English here for the first time. The result is an essential collection of essays that explore Merleau-Ponty's importance in terms of his originality vis--vis the philosophical tradition, and examine his major insights about such contemporary concerns as subjectivity, the question of the other and sociality, the natural and the human, art, the sensible and the intelligible, and the philosophical study of language. Penetrating and illuminating, these essays firmly install Merleau-Ponty among the most innovative and critically debated thinkers of the past half century.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
List of Abbreviations	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Homage to Merleau-Ponty	p. 17
Merleau-Ponty: Beyond Husserl and Heidegger (1989)	p. 25
The Turn of Experience: Merleau-Ponty and Bergson	p. 33
Community, Society, and History in the Later Merleau-Ponty	p. 61
Tracework: Experience and Description in the Moral Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas	p. 79
Merleau-Ponty and the Philosophical Position of Skepticism	p. 117
The Elemental Flesh: Nature, Life, and Difference in Merleau-Ponty and Plato's Timaeus	p. 129
The Blind Spot	p. 155
Proximity and Distance: With Regard to Heidegger in the Later Merleau-Ponty	p. 165
Chiasm, Flesh, Figuration: Toward a Non-Positive Ontology	p. 183
Phenomenology of the Icon	p. 197
On the "Fundamental of Painting": Chinese Counterpoint	p. 221
Variations of the Sensible: The Truth of Ideas and Idea of Philosophy in the Later Merleau-Ponty	p. 237
The Body of Speech	p. 257
Body, Flesh	p. 275
List of Contributors	p. 293
Index	p. 297
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.