Institution and Passivity

Institution and Passivity PDF Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Institution and Passivity is based on course notes for classes taught at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris. Philosophically, this collection connects the issue of passive constitution of meaning with the dimension of history, furthering discussions and completing arguments started in The Visible and the Invisible and Signs (both published by Northwestern). Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey’s translation makes available to an English-speaking readership a critical transitional text in the history of phenomenology.

The Birth of Sense

The Birth of Sense PDF Author: Don Beith
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821446266
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
In The Birth of Sense, Don Beith proposes a new concept of generative passivity, the idea that our organic, psychological, and social activities take time to develop into sense. More than being a limit, passivity marks out the way in which organisms, persons, and interbodily systems take time in order to manifest a coherent sense. Beith situates his argument within contemporary debates about evolution, developmental biology, scientific causal explanations, psychology, postmodernism, social constructivism, and critical race theory. Drawing on empirical studies and phenomenological reflections, Beith argues that in nature, novel meaning emerges prior to any type of constituting activity or deterministic plan. The Birth of Sense is an original phenomenological investigation in the style of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and it demonstrates that the French philosopher’s works cohere around the notion that life is radically expressive. While Merleau-Ponty’s early works are widely interpreted as arguing for the primacy of human consciousness, Beith argues that a pivotal redefinition of passivity is already under way here, and extends throughout Merleau-Ponty’s corpus. This work introduces new concepts in contemporary philosophy to interrogate how organic development involves spontaneous expression, how personhood emerges from this bodily growth, and how our interpersonal human life remains rooted in, and often thwarted by, domains of bodily expressivity.

Child Psychology and Pedagogy

Child Psychology and Pedagogy PDF Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810126141
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
Maurice Merleau-Ponty is one of the few major phenomenologists to engage extensively with empirical research in the sciences, and the only one to examine child psychology with rigor and in such depth. His writings have recently become increasingly influential, as the findings of psychology and cognitive science inform and are informed by phenomenological inquiry. Merleau-Ponty’s Sorbonne lectures of 1949 to 1952 are a broad investigation into child psychology, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, phenomenology, sociology, and anthropology. They argue that the subject of child psychology is critical for any philosophical attempt to understand individual and intersubjective existence. Talia Welsh’s new translation provides Merleau-Ponty’s complete lectures on the seminal engagement of phenomenology and psychology.

Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism

Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism PDF Author: Rajiv Kaushik
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438476779
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Merleau-Ponty says in his Institution and Passivity lectures that he wants to "consider criticism itself as a symbolic form" instead of doing "a philosophy of symbolic form." This invites the possibility of an unconventional thought: If critical philosophy is a symbolic form, it cannot disclose its own limits and is, in fact, uncritical. Furthermore, the symbolic form can never itself be thought according to the terms of the criticism it produces but is always only constellated and matrixed within them—a symbolic form within both reflection and what it reflects on, within consciousness and the world. Thus, as Rajiv Kaushik argues, the symbolic form is another name for what Merleau-Ponty calls ontological divergence. Only now divergence introduces the question of a limit to both the subject and philosophy itself. This is nothing less than a psychoanalysis of philosophy. Kaushik's analyses of the matrices between space—imagination, light—dark, awake—asleep, and repression—expression reveal this symbolism in its form of divergence, its lack of origin and destination. Kaushik also argues that the phenomenology of symbolism must detour from the purely descriptive method. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty's recently published course materials, and attentive to his reliance on literature and literary language, Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism continues the living force of Merleau-Ponty's thought and develops his radical insight of the primacy of the symbolic form, even in an ontology that claims to be about the sensible and its elements.

Time, Memory, Institution

Time, Memory, Institution PDF Author: David Morris
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821444964
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This collection is the first extended investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole and the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings the French phenomenologist’s views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus. Time, Memory, Institution argues that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity, as such; it is gathered out of a radical openness to what is not self, and that it gathers itself in a time that is not merely a given dimension, but folds back upon, gathers, and institutes itself. Access to previously unavailable texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and expression, has presented scholars with new resources for thinking about time, memory, and history. These essays represent the best of this new direction in scholarship; they deepen our understanding of self and world in relation to time and memory; and they give occasion to reexamine Merleau-Ponty’s contribution and relevance to contemporary Continental philosophy. This volume is essential reading for scholars of phenomenology and French philosophy, as well as for the many readers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who continue to draw insight and inspiration from Merleau-Ponty. Contributors: Elizabeth Behnke, Edward Casey, Véronique Fóti, Donald Landes, Kirsten Jacobson, Galen Johnson, Michael Kelly, Scott Marratto, Glen Mazis, Caterina Rea, John Russon, Robert Vallier, and Bernhard Waldenfels

The Sensible World and the World of Expression

The Sensible World and the World of Expression PDF Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810141426
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
The Sensible World and the World of Expression presents the lecture notes for a course taught by Maurice Marleau-Ponty, a central figure of phenomenological philosophy, at a key point in his career.

The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness

The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness PDF Author: Edmund Husserl
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253041996
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness is a translation of Edmund Husserl’s Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins. The first part of the book was originally presented as a lecture course at the University of Göttingen in the winter semester of 1904–1905, while the second part is based on additional supplementary lectures that he gave between 1905 and 1910. In these essays and lectures, Husserl explores the terrain of consciousness in light of its temporality. He identifies two categories of temporality—retention and protention—and outlines how temporality provides the form for perception, phantasy, imagination, memory, and recollection. He demonstrates a distinction between cosmic and phenomenological time and explores the relevance of phenomenological time for the constitution of temporal objects. The ideas Husserl developed here are explored further in his Ideas and were pursued until the end of his philosophical career.

The Possibility of Philosophy

The Possibility of Philosophy PDF Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810144557
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
The Possibility of Philosophy presents the notes that Maurice Merleau‐Ponty prepared for three courses he taught at the Collège de France: “The Possibility of Philosophy Today,” given in the spring semester of 1959, and “Cartesian Ontology and Ontology Today” and “Philosophy and Nonphilosophy since Hegel,” both given in the spring semester of 1961. The last two courses remain incomplete due to Merleau-Ponty’s unexpected death on May 3, 1961. Nonetheless, they provide indications of the new ontology that informed The Visible and the Invisible, a posthumously published work that was under way at the same time. These courses offer readers of Merleau‐Ponty’s late thought a wealth of references—to painting, literature, and psychoanalysis, and to the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Descartes, Hegel, and Marx—that fill in some of the missing pieces of The Visible and the Invisible, especially its often terse and sometimes cryptic working notes. We see more clearly how Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to bring forth a new ontology indicates a fundamental revision in what it means to think, an attempt to reimagine the possibility of philosophy.

The Thinking of the Sensible

The Thinking of the Sensible PDF Author: Mauro Carbone
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810119862
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
In this first English publication of a well-known and widely respected Italian scholar, readers will encounter the preeminent interpreter of the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty engaged in a dialogue of critical concern to contemporary philosophy. In subtle and sensitive language eminently suited to the style and substance of Merleau-Ponty's own writings, Mauro Carbone fashions four essays around a central theme-the relations of the sensible and the intelligible, and of philosophy and non-philosophy-that occupied Merleau-Ponty in his later work. An original and innovative interpretation of the ontology of Merleau-Ponty--and themselves a significant contribution to the field of Continental thought--these essays constitute a sustained exploration of what Merleau-Ponty detected, and greeted, as a "mutation within the relations of man and Being," which would provide him with the basis for a new idea of philosophy or "a-philosophy." In lucid, often elegant terms, Carbone analyzes key elements of Merleau-Ponty's thought in relation to Proust's Recherche, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the new biology of Von Uexküll, Rimbaud's Lettre du voyant, and Heidegger's conception of "letting-be." His work clearly demonstrates the vitality of Merleau-Ponty's late revolutionary philosophy by following its most salient, previously unexplored paths. This is essential reading for any scholar with an interest in Merleau-Ponty, in the questions of embodiment, temporality and Nature, or in the possibility of philosophy today.

Art and Institution

Art and Institution PDF Author: Rajiv Kaushik
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441138730
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Art and Institution examines how for Merleau-Ponty the work of art opens up, without conceptualizing, the event of being. Rajiv Kaushik treats Merleau-Ponty's renderings of the artwork - specifically in his later writings during the period ranging from 1952-1961 - as a path into the being that precedes phenomenology. Replete with references to Merleau-Ponty's reflections on Matisse, Cézanne, Proust and others, and featuring Kaushik's own original reflections on various artworks, this book is guided by the notion that art does not iterate the findings of phenomenology so much as it allows phenomenology to finally discover what, as a matter of principle, it seeks: the very foundation of experience that is not itself available to thought. Kaushik is thus concerned with the ways in which the work of art restores the principle of institution, prior to the intentional structures of consciousness, so that phenomenology may settle questions concerning ontological difference, the origination of significance, and the relationship between interiority and exteriority.