The Beagle record: By R. D. Keynes. Pp. 409. Cambridge University Press, London. 1979. £30.00

Naturalizing phenomenology – A philosophical imperative

Apresenta-se uma breve consideracao daquilo que e essencial a fenomenologia de Edmund Husserl, juntamente com sinopses dos componentes da concepcao husserliana da investigacao cientifica. Algumas modificacoes construtivas de seus estudantes - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alfred Schutz e Aron Gurwitsch - sao esbocadas, inclusive algumas sugeridas por sociologos e etnometodologos, Theodor Adorno e Harold Garfinkel entre eles. A tese e que as investigacoes fenomenologicas podem ser enriquecidas pelas investigacoes etnometodologicas dos detalhes locais dos testemunhos do decurso dos eventos mundanos, tal como sao vividos. Quando totalmente focados em sua temporalidade local, tais estudos podem nos dizer mais sobre os topicos fenomenologicamente ricos da producao de sentido e da objetivacao do significado do que a fenomenologia constitutiva de Husserl poderia ter conhecido.

An important contribution to the field of communication is François Cooren's critique of the assumption that the social and the material are entangled because this assumption reproduces the divide it claims to reject. Rather, Cooren proposes that the social and the material are properties, or (im-)properties, of one another because their relational differences bring organizations into existence. Cooren's three conclusions on this matter argue that the sociomateriality of an organization is a relational ontology. In this article, I problematize those three conclusions and suggest Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh as an alternative to overcome the problematics of each conclusion. Conclusion 1 lacks a conceptual groundwork explaining where social and material matter comes from, and I suggest flesh as the element to categorize matter. Conclusion 2 denigrates human existence to a matter of degree. I reframe this through the notion of alterity. Conclusion 3 suggests that relations and relata are the same yet theoretical support for that proposition is missing. As such, I offer the missing theoretical support through Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh. Taken together, Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh provides one coherent system and better affirms each of Cooren's conclusions of what a relational/communicative ontology of organization consists of.

In a fourteenth-century copy of Henri de Mondeville's Chirurgia (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 0.2.44), a flayed human body carries its skin on a staff, displaying the underlying fleshy tissues. The unpainted drawing illustrates Mondeville's discussion of flesh and fat. Taking this image as its main focus, this article is concerned with the fleshiness of the medieval image. It considers medieval understanding of flesh to examine the relationship between flesh and the figure in the Chirurgia. I explore closely the relationship between parchment, a support made of skin, and the pen-drawing on its surface. Moreover, I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh, which postulates an association between visuality and flesh. Overall, the article argues that the drawing formulates a discourse on flesh. It is not merely a depiction of flesh but rather, I contend, becomes fleshy in the interaction with the viewer.

To explore the limitations of the concept of 'truth' in the ontology of evidence-based psychiatry and to provide expanded ontological foundations for psychiatric practice based instead on the ontology of the French existential-phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Evidence-based medicine is founded on a 'scientific' ontology of 'causality', which equates 'truth' with effecting statistically-significant changes in objective measures of disease by a specified treatment. Because of the absence of biological markers of disease in psychiatry, evidence-based psychiatry equates 'truth' with effecting changes in observable psychometric measures of behaviour. This is the same ontology underlying marketing 'spin' and all attempts to effect pre-determined behavioural change. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty's ontology rejects causality and mind/body duality, and views 'truth' as the expression of our deepest embodied feeling and perception of the world, which establishes all our thinking, and on which all our thinking relies, including 'scientific' thinking. Merleau-Ponty's ontology is therefore a preferable foundation for psychiatric practice, because it allows psychiatrists to consider the 'truth' of clinically important, but non-measurable, aspects of psychiatry while not excluding 'scientific' thinking, but recognising its limitations and potential for misuse.

El presente trabajo intenta justificar desde la fenomenología de Husserl y Merleau-Ponty la interrelación entre filosofía y no filosofía y, con ella, la interacción de Occidente y Oriente. Para ello negaremos, en primer lugar, su condición de contrarios; posteriormente ejemplificaremos las posibilidades de sus intercambios haciendo referencia a la fenomenología y a la Escuela de Kyoto, concretamente a sus respectivas concepciones de la conciencia en las que yo y no-yo no se oponen, sino que integran un campo de diferencias. La obra de M.T. Román, especialmente su último libro, actúa como hilo conductor de nuestra interpretación de la conciencia fenomenológica y del yo de Nishida dejando constancia de la importancia del “entre” para ejercer mediaciones. Una de sus formas es el silencio.

Throughout much of human history, the detachment of the mind from the body seems to be the conspicuous antagonism that permeates the Western philosophy. René Descarte's decisive premise « I think, therefore I am » usurped the body's role in rational thought, relegating it into a state where it has almost no relevance in philosophical discourse. As a result of this exclusion, women were seen as creatures of nature and emotion and therefore deterritorialized from the realm of the rational as their bodies are intrinsically associated with their identities which are much more likely to be marked by defectiveness. Because phenomenology is concerned with the lived experience of subjects, it serves as a major impetus for understanding subjective embodiment. In this vein, Maurice Merleau Ponty, a 20th century French philosopher, argues that the body is an essential agent in the world since it is the implied sine qua none for making any orientation when the subject perceives. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau Ponty dissects how embodiment is experienced by humans in a universal account assuming that the male body remains an asset of all types of embodiment. This paper juxtaposes Merleau Ponty and philosophy's deliberate omission of the female body. I claim that the superiority of the mind/reason over the body/emotion is used as a pretext to separate men and women. Drawing on Iris Marison Young's feminist phenomenology, I contend that Merleau Ponty's phenomenological account is so problematic since he merely reversed the binary while still maintaining the privileged status of the male subject. I call attention to the essential need to interrogate the sexual difference when addressing the issue of embodiment. Because bringing back the body to the philosophical interest seems to offer "an Archimedean point of stability” in a cultural condition where, according to Sarah Coakly, no "universal ‘grand narrative'” is plausible anymore, I reflect on the essential account of the liberating potential of the female body drawing on my moral convictions.

There are two main approaches in the phenomenological understanding of the unconscious. The first explores the intentional theory of the unconscious, while the second develops a non-representational way of understanding consciousness and the unconscious. This paper aims to outline a general theoretical framework for the non-representational approach to the unconscious within the phenomenological tradition. In order to do so, I focus on three relevant theories: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Thomas Fuchs’ phenomenology of body memory, and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of affectivity. Both Merleau-Ponty and Fuchs understand the unconscious as a “sedimented practical schema” of subjective being in the world. This sedimented unconscious contributes to the way we implicitly interpret reality, fill in the gaps of uncertainty, and invest our social interactions with meaning. Husserl, however, approaches the unconscious in terms of affective non-vivacity, as a sphere of sedimentation and the horizon of the distant past which stays affectively connected to the living present. Drawing on these ideas, I argue that these two accounts can reinforce one another and provide the ground for a phenomenological understanding of the unconscious in terms of the horizontal dimension of subjective experience and a non-representational relation to the past.

In this book, T. L. Short corrects widespread misconceptions of Peirce's theory of signs and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary analytic philosophy of language, mind and science. Peirce's theory of mind, naturalistic but nonreductive, bears on debates of Fodor and Millikan, among others. His theory of inquiry avoids foundationalism and subjectivism, while his account of reference anticipated views of Kripke and Putnam. Peirce's realism falls between 'internal' and 'metaphysical' realism and is more satisfactory than either. His pragmatism is not verificationism; rather, it identifies meaning with potential growth of knowledge. Short distinguishes Peirce's mature theory of signs from his better-known but paradoxical early theory. He develops the mature theory systematically on the basis of Peirce's phenomenological categories and concept of final causation. The latter is distinguished from recent and similar views, such as Brandon's, and is shown to be grounded in forms of explanation adopted in modern science.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory of the body brings a new perspective to Western philosophy and phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty inherited Husserl's phenomenology of consciousness and emphasized the idea of the oneness of mind and body. In this theory, Merleau-Ponty put forward the concept of flesh to oppose the Cartesian dichotomy of body and mind. In his understanding of perception, Merleau-Ponty proposed the concept of perceptual field, in which Merleau-Ponty believed that perception is embodied in the form of a field in which things can be presented in the most primitive and complete way, and perception is direct. At the same time, the concept of flesh of the world is also put forward. Flesh is the basic nature of people and the world, and the communication between human beings and the external world is the flesh and the flesh of the world. The communication between human beings and the external world is the direct mutual perception and interaction between the flesh and the flesh of the world. According to Merleau-Ponty, in communication, the body is the medium for perceiving and understanding symbols, and the meaning of symbols is formed through bodily experience and culture. The speech act is a complex expression of the body's interaction with the world that allows for a shared experience between the speaker and the listener. Merleau-Ponty's concept emphasizes the monadic embodiment of perception and thought, matter and consciousness in the body, breaking through the limitations of the a priori philosophical thinking of Western logic.

Twenty-two years after his death, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's name is fairly well known in the English-speaking world. His writings have long been available in translation. A sizeable secondary literature exists. He seems, however, to have had remarkably little impact on current discussions in philosophy or the human sciences. His concerns, which ranged from Husserlian phenomenology to struc? tural linguistics, from Lacanian psychoanalysis to Marxian social theory, con? tinue to attract attention. His subtle discussions of them, strangely, do not. Granted, he is not an easy thinker to comprehend. Marjorie Grene, one of the few to have engaged his work on a serious level, once confessed that 'Thinking about him produces a kind of verbal vertigo" (Grene 1976, p. 622). It has been far easier for commentators to repeat the incantation "body, flesh, ambiguity, world" than to sober up enough to determine what precisely it was that he was trying to say. But something more is to blame for his present fate than that baffling mode of writing, so nuanced in his hands and so unintentionally silly in the hands of imitators. Merleau-Ponty's work was informed by two traditions which continue to find adherents today: Husserlian phenomenology and Marx? ism. His relationship to both, however, was by no means unequivocal. Phe? nomenology, which he had taken up wholeheartedly in his 1945 magnum opus

The three noted thinkers selected for discussion here are Carl Gustave Jung, Emmanuel Levinas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, all of whom were more or less contemporaries. These thinkers bring to ontology very different perspectives than those of conventional metaphysics. Equally versed in psychiatry, religion, metaphysics, the mystical traditions of the East and the West, and the human sciences in general, Jung was one of the most interesting and versatile thinkers of the twentieth century. From a pedagogic point of view, the lessons of his researches prepare the serious student for a brush with the archetypal currents whose intersectional nodes appear to us as the personality, and by means of which we regulate our relations with the what-is. Coming to Levinas, the philosopher Jacques Derrida once said that his work was an ethics of ethics. Levinas himself spoke of ethics as “first philosophy.” But it is precisely because he re-prioritizes and gives ethics a higher prominence than all other avenues of considering metaphysics that Levinas becomes important in the educational context. Finally, Merleau-Ponty was one of the most influential philosophers of post-war France. His later work influenced thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and others of the post-structuralist generation. The ontology of perception was the overwhelming concern of Merleau-Ponty’s work for which he used Husserlian phenomenology as his primary framework.

Communicative Ethics and the Claims of Transcendental Phenomenology: Exploring the Foundations of Intersubjectivity

In a "return" to Edmund Husserl and Sigmund Freud, Intimacy and the Anxieties of Cinematic Flesh explores how we can engage these foundational thinkers of phenomenology and psychoanalysis in an original approach to film. The idea of the intimate spectator caught up in anxiety is developed to investigate a range of topics central to these critical approaches and cinema, including: flesh as a disruptive state formed in the relationships of intimacy and anxiety; time and the formation of cinema’s enduring objects; space and things; the sensual, the "real" and the unconscious; wildness, disruption, and resistance; and the nightmare, reading "phantasy" across the critical fields. Along with Husserl and Freud, other key thinkers discussed include Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mikel Dufrenne in phenomenology; Melanie Klein, Ernest Jones, Julia Kristeva, and Rosine Lefort in psychoanalysis. Framing these issues and critical approaches is the question: how might Husserlian phenomenology and Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis, so often seen as contradistinctive, be explored through their potential commonalities rather than differences? In addressing such a question, this book postulates a new approach to film through this phenomenological/psychoanalytic reconceptualization. A wide range of films are examined not simply as exemplars, but to test the idea that cinema itself can be a version of critical thinking.

Culture and dialogue: Positioning, mediation or style?