Browse — concepts

Concepts

528 concepts

• *Corpus corporum* (Nancy)

  Latin: "corpus of corpora"; literally "body of bodies" but operatively "a collection of collections." Nancy's name (Corpus 155) for the body without organic-functional unity — zoned, acephalic and aphallic, "discontinuous, fragmentary, par…

• *Existenzial* vs. *Kategorial*

  In Sein und Zeit (1927), Heidegger draws a terminological distinction between two kinds of ontological determinations: Existenzialien (existentials) — determinations of the being-that-is-Dasein, i.e., of Existenz — and Kategorien (categori…

• *Mêlée* (Nancy)

  Nancy's signature term for the event of a knot, an entanglement that is also a disentanglement. Distinct from mixture (which forms a new homogeneous compound out of two formerly distinct elements). The mêlée preserves the irreducible separ…

• *Rien* (Nancy)

  Nancy's philosophical use of French rien — etymologically from Latin rem (accusative of res, "thing"), via Old French where rien meant "something" rather than "nothing." For Nancy, le rien names the thing tending toward its pure being-a-th…

• *Seinsverlassenheit* / Abandonment of Being

  Heidegger's name for the abandonment of Being — a key motif of his later thought (esp. Contributions to Philosophy and the Letter on Humanism). Nancy retranslates it (délaissement de l'être) and gives it a double sense: (a) Being is left b…

• *Stimmung* / Attunement

  Stimmung (variously translated "attunement," "disposition," "mood") names the ontological condition under which beings-as-a-whole disclose themselves — not a psychological accompaniment to thought or action, but the Ge-stimmtheit (being-at…

• *Unum quid* (Descartes)

  Latin: "one and the same thing"; "a certain something one." Descartes's name in the Sixth Meditation (AT VII 81 — the French version has "une même chose" / "un seul tout," AT IXa 12, 64) for the substantial union of the soul and the body —…

• A-focalism

  Merleau-Ponty's coinage at Investigations into the Literary Use of Language Appendix [168]v (1953) naming the positive consciousness-structure he proposes against Sartre's centripetal cogito: "a sort of a-focalism: there is no center and p…

• A-Philosophy (Merleau-Ponty)

  Merleau-Ponty's radicalized formulation in the 1959 Collège course "The Possibility of Philosophy Today" (published 2022): "true philosophy mocks philosophy, is a-philosophy" (line 1507). A-philosophy — pronounced and written with the alph…

• Absolute Knowing

  Absolutes Wissen — the standpoint achieved at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Chapter VIII, §§788–808, raw lines 4691–4851). The journey's terminus: Geist knows itself as Geist; consciousness and self-consciousness have become iden…

• Action at a Distance

  The governing figure of the Introduction to Signs (1960). Action at a distance names the relation that holds between philosophy and politics, philosophy and history, and between thought and its "outside" generally: neither subordination (H…

• Action of Unveiling vs. Action of Governing

  Merleau-Ponty's distinction, in Chapter 5 of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), between two orders of historical action: the action of unveiling — the writer's, journalist's, artist's, or philosopher's domain of showing, analyzing, exposi…

• Adultomorphism

  Merleau-Ponty's HUB-level methodological diagnostic in the 1949–52 Sorbonne lectures: the recurring temptation to read the child through the adult — to import adult categories, dichotomies, and norms into the description of child experienc…

• Aesthetic Consciousness

  Aesthetic consciousness (ästhetisches Bewußtsein) is Gadamer's diagnostic name, in Part One of Truth and Method, for the modern stance — founded by Schiller's "standpoint of art" — that makes the experiencing subject "the experiencing cent…

• Aftermath of the Absolute

  Malraux's structural-historical thesis (Part IV title and §V theme of The Voices of Silence): with the eclipse of religion as the West's organizing absolute, art itself has been promoted to the structural position the absolute occupies. Th…

• Agnosia (Merleau-Ponty)

  Visual agnosia is the clinical condition that gives Merleau-Ponty the case of Schneider in Phenomenology of Perception — Schneider, the WWI veteran whose shrapnel injury produced an inability to perceive the world as a field of possibility…

• Aletheia / Unverborgenheit

  The Greek ἀ-λήθεια (un-concealment), translated by Heidegger hartnäckig (stubbornly) as Unverborgenheit — not for etymology's sake but für die Sache, der bedacht werden muß. Heidegger's most concentrated late treatment of Aletheia is in "D…

• Allgemein / Besonderes / Einzelnes (Universal / Particular / Individual, Hegel)

  Allgemeinheit, Besonderheit, and Einzelheit — universality, particularity, individuality — are the three moments of the Concept in Hegel's Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 32–52). Each moment is the whole Concept under one inflection — n…

• Allonomy (Nancy)

  Nancy's name for the constitutive otherness-of-self that is more originary than any autonomy. From Greek allos (other) + nomos (law): "his own law is other than himself" (Fragile Skin II §3 a). The diagnostic operates at three registers: (…

• Ambiguïté vs Ambivalence (MP's distinction)

  Merleau-Ponty's philosophically technical distinction between two opposed modes of being-in-contradiction. Contrary to the received cliché of MP as "philosopher of ambiguity" in a weak, irenic sense, Saint Aubert's Ch I §§ 2-3 establishes…

• Amodal Completion

  A class of phenomenal-organizational events identified by Kanizsa (1991) in which the perceptual system "completes" a partially occluded object — perceiving it as continuous behind the occluder despite the absence of any continuous distal…

• Anamnesis (Recollection)

  Plato's doctrine that learning is recollection — the recovery of knowledge the immortal soul already possesses, not the reception of wholly new content. Introduced in the Meno to dissolve the paradox of inquiry, it is re-grounded in the Ph…

• Anarchy in the Ground (das Regellose im Grunde)

  Schelling's name in the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) for the irreducible non-rule (das Regellose) that persists in the ground even after the eternal act of self-revelation. The canonical passage (De…

• Anonymous Depth

  A late-Merleau-Ponty term for the dimensional register that is real for the subject but not an object of attention — a sister-concept of horizon, wild-being, and invisible of this world in the late ontology. The term surfaces explicitly in…

• Anthropologisme

  Per Saint Aubert (2006 Ch I §2), Merleau-Ponty's anthropologisme is not the same as anthropologie. It is the negative humanism of the humanisme criticiste — Brunschvicg's "humanisme radical où tout est construit et tout est donné" — extend…

• Antigone (Hegel's Reading)

  Hegel reads Sophocles' Antigone (442 BCE) as the structural figure of immediate ethical substance — the ethical actor whose deed (burying her brother against Creon's edict) reveals the constitutively guilty structure of ethical action unde…

• Anwesenlassen (the doubled letting-presence)

  Heidegger's cardinal late-Heidegger verbal noun for the inner sense of Anwesenheit — and the gate from the metaphysical Sein-Seiendes mode to the Ereignis-mode. Locus classicus: Zeit und Sein (1962) p. 5: "Sein, dadurch jegliches Seiende a…

• Aporia (Productive Impasse)

  Aporia (ἀπορία — literally "no way through," hence impasse, perplexity) is the state of acknowledged not-knowing in which Plato's "Socratic" dialogues characteristically end and the later dialogues repeatedly turn. Its distinctively Platon…

• Application (Anwendung)

  For Gadamer, application (Anwendung) is not a step that follows understanding but a moment intrinsic to it: "application does not mean first understanding a given universal in itself and then afterward applying it to a concrete case. It is…

• Aquatic Ontology

  The central thesis of Knight's monograph: Merleau-Ponty's late ontology is best understood as a water cosmogony. Being does not emerge through the parting of earth and sky (Heidegger) or the oppressive plenitude of Night (Levinas), but thr…

• Arche-Screen

  Carbone's technical neologism for the transhistorical apparatus of showing-and-concealing images on whatever surface. The arche-screen is not a Platonic form abstracted from its variants (cave wall, mirror, veil, Albertian window, cinema s…

• Art as Revolt Against Fate

  Malraux's cardinal closing thesis in The Voices of Silence: "All art is a revolt against man's fate" (p. 671). Across all civilizations, art's deepest function is to defend man against destiny — the masterpiece "tells of a human victory ov…

• Asymptotic Intentionality

  Frank Chouraqui's technical term (borrowed from Leibnizian infinitesimal calculus) for the structure of intentionality shared by Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty: a linear movement structured by two end-points it never reaches but approaches in…

• Aufheben (sublate)

  Aufheben is Hegel's signature dialectical operation: a single German verb that simultaneously means to cancel (tollere, negieren), to preserve (aufbewahren), and to lift up (emporheben). Hegel takes this triple lexical structure as evidenc…

• Aufhebung

  Hegel's term for negation-that-preserves-and-elevates — the structural operation by which the dialectic moves from one shape of consciousness to its successor without simple abolition. Pinkard's 2018 Cambridge translation renders consisten…

• Augenblick

  The temporal-existential locus in which past and future converge in decision. Etymologically "blink-of-the-eye," the Augenblick is the moment of seeing-and-deciding — not a temporal point on a timeline but the Zeitlichkeit des Selbsthandel…

• Auseinandersetzung

  Heidegger's technical name for the proper mode of relation to a thinker. Distinct from interpretation, criticism, and refutation, Auseinandersetzung is "die höchste und einzige Weise der wahren Schätzung eines Denkers" — the highest and on…

• Bad Conscience

  Nietzsche's name (schlechtes Gewissen) for the "deep sickness" produced when the outward-discharging instincts of "wild, free, roaming" humans were blocked by the violently-imposed state and forced to turn against the self — the central hy…

• Barbarian Principle

  Schelling's concept of the irreducible wild essence at the heart of existence — "could be stifled, but never suppressed" (Ages of the World). Appropriated by Merleau-Ponty as être sauvage (wild being) and esprit sauvage (wild mind), the ba…

• Bedingung / Sache an sich (Condition / The Thing Itself, Hegel)

  Bedingung (condition) and Sache an sich (the thing itself) are the paired transitional categories that bridge Grund and Existenz in the Erster Abschnitt of the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 5180–5263). The cardinal formulation: "wenn alle…

• Behavior as Form (Neither Thing Nor Consciousness)

  The signature thesis of Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior — articulated at the end of Ch II and grounding the rest of the book: behavior is irreducibly a form, situated in neither of the two classical orders (in-itself / for-itself…

• Being In and Toward the World

  Merleau-Ponty's signature formulation of the human being's relation to world — the être au monde of Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Donald Landes as "being in and toward the world" to capture the directional-inhabiting complexit…

• Bestimmte Negation (Determined Negation)

  Bestimmte Negation — determined negation — is Hegel's signature account of the engine of dialectical movement. Its locus classicus is the Einleitung to the Wissenschaft der Logik at GW 21 raw 898 ("das Negative eben so sehr positiv ist, od…

• Bestimmtheit / Bestimmung / Beschaffenheit / Grenze (Determinacy Quartet)

  Hegel's four-term vocabulary for the categorial structure of Daseyn: Bestimmtheit (determinacy in general), Bestimmung (the something's intrinsic determination), Beschaffenheit (its extrinsic constitution), and Grenze (the limit where Best…

• Beständigung des Werdens in die Anwesenheit

  Heidegger's climactic thesis on the essence of will to power: it is the Beständigung des Werdens in die Anwesenheit — the making-stand-fast of becoming into abiding presence. The phrase appears at the close of Der Wille zur Macht als Erken…

• Bildung

  Bildung — Pinkard renders as "cultural formation" or "cultural education" — is Hegel's term for the process by which the individual recapitulates the world-spirit's path and so becomes culturally formed-and-educated rationality. The concep…

• Blind vs. Manifested Necessity (Hegel)

  The distinction between blind and manifested necessity is Hegel's signature account of the necessity-passes-into-freedom doctrine, located in the closing pages of the Dritter Abschnitt of the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 6131–6168, with…

• Body Schema

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the pre-reflective, practical awareness of the body's posture and configuration — not a representation of the body, but a system of postural readiness oriented toward tasks. MP takes the term from Henry Head and Pa…

• Brauch (late-Heidegger use/need of mortals by the Eignis)

  Heidegger's late-Heidegger term for the use / need that the Ereignis (the Eignis) exerts on the mortals, and that mortals owe to the Eignis. Locus classicus: Zeit und Sein (1962) marginalia (4) at p. 15 ("Brauchen"), (10) at p. 23 ("Brauch…

• Broad vs. Narrow Psychoanalysis

  Merleau-Ponty's named taxonomy of post-Freudian options, articulated at the 1949–50 Sorbonne (chapter 2 §III of Child Psychology and Pedagogy). MP names the broad camp explicitly: Politzer, Bachelard, Sartre ("existential psychoanalysis"),…

• Bêtise

  Bêtise — the French word that the Random House dictionary mistranslates as "stupidity" — is the seminar's most-developed concept and its index-case of untranslatability. BS-I devotes Sessions 5, 6, 7, and large parts of 8 and 12 to it, wit…

• Call and Vocation (l'appel)

  Mounier's structural-vertical of the personal life across Personalism. The call (l'appel) is the structure through which freedom, value, vocation, and prophetic action all operate: freedom is "always something called forth" (Ch V, p. 60);…

• Capital as Concrete Phenomenology of Spirit

  Merleau-Ponty's reading of Marx's Capital as a Phénoménologie de l'esprit concrète — the economic-historical structure of capitalism read as the real-world unfolding of phenomenological structure. Capital is not a work of political economy…

• Carnal Cogito

  Saint Aubert's gloss on a Merleau-Ponty working-note formulation (November 1960): "Le « où suis-je ? » et « quelle heure est-il ? » de Claudel porte déjà la philosophie" — the carnal cogito. The phrase names MP's late re-positioning of the…

• Cartesian Oscillation

  Merleau-Ponty's name for Descartes's inability to sustain a single conception of Nature. In the 1956–57 first Nature course, MP reads Descartes as running two incompatible inspirations — Nature as exteriority (res extensa, infinite mechani…

• Cartesian-Sartrian Ontology of the Object

  Morin's diagnostic name (recurring across Part II of her 2022 monograph) for the ontology — common to Descartes and Sartre — that both MP's late ontology and Nancy's materialism work against. Its features: (a) objects are strictly delimite…

• Cautious Anthropomorphism

  A strategic use of human predicates for non-human things in order to defamiliarise both terms — neither to make stones knowable like us, nor to flatten ontological difference into a uniform plane. The term enters the contemporary new-mater…

• Centralität (Centrality / Free Mechanism, Hegel)

  Centralität (or Centralkörper / freier Mechanismus) is the absolute moment of Mechanism in the Objectivität-section of the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 143–146, with the cardinal political application at p. 152). The multiplicity of…

• Changement de quantité en qualité (degeneration thesis)

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947–49 articulation of how stalinism emerges from leninism without revolutionary rupture: through a change of quantity into quality, of means into end ("changement de quantité en qualité, de moyen en fin"). What was an exc…

• Chiasm

  Merleau-Ponty's concept for the crossing, encroachment, and mutual enveloping of sensing and sensed — the central structural concept of his late ontology. Crucially, the chiasm is structural non-coincidence: "It is time to emphasize that i…

• Chiral Reversibility

  David Morris's interpretive model of Merleau-Pontian reversibility, deployed by Morin in Ch 8 §2 to block the Hegelian symmetrical-reciprocity reading of the chiasm. The model is the incongruent-counterparts image: a right-hand glove is al…

• Christian Love (Simmel's Reconstruction)

  Simmel's philosophical reconstruction of Christian love as a distinct trans-vital love-form, structurally opposed to universal-philanthropy: Christian love embraces the total person — sinner as sinner, "without that 'in spite of'" (Oakes p…

• Christian Semantics of Chair (Flesh)

  Preliminary stub (weave Pass 2, 2026-06-03) homing a HUB motif previously distributed across hand-of-god, haptocentrism, mondialisation-of-flesh, and flesh-as-element §"Positions" without a dedicated corpus-level page. The second of Derrid…

• Cinematographic Mechanism of Thought

  Bergson's name (Chapter IV of Creative Evolution) for the structural way the human intellect falsifies movement and becoming: it extracts immobile snapshots ("views," vues) from the moving real and then recomposes movement by running the s…

• Circulus Vitiosus Deus

  Nietzsche's phrase from Beyond Good and Evil §56 — "Well? And wouldn't this then be — circulus vitiosus deus?" — asking whether the mysterious desire to think "down to the depths of pessimism" might itself be a return to an opposite ideal,…

• Co-Naissance

  A portmanteau from Paul Claudel's Art poétique (1907) that fuses naissance (birth) with connaissance (knowledge): to know is to be co-born. Merleau-Ponty adopts this concept from his earliest work (The Structure of Behavior, 1942) through…

• Coefficient of Adversity

  A term coined by Bachelard (against the phenomenological tradition) for the resistance things offer to projects. The concept's genealogy is the precise pivot of Ch 5 of morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being: Bachelard's complaint that phenomenol…

• Coexistence

  Merleau-Ponty's term in Phenomenology of Perception for the structural togetherness of bodies, points, sensations, and selves that is not built up from prior atomic units but is presupposed in the unity of any experience. Coexistence names…

• Coherent Deformation

  Malraux's term, transformed by Merleau-Ponty into the universal form of expressive operation. Coherent deformation is what happens when a style — a painter's, a writer's, a culture's — reorganizes the available system of signs "by affectin…

• Collection and Division (Diairesis)

  Plato's mature dialectical method, defined in the Phaedrus and deployed throughout the Sophist: collection (synagōgē) — "seeing together things that are scattered about everywhere and collecting them into one kind" so as to define — and di…

• Concrete Mediation

  Inkpin's term for the mode by which individuals relate to a cultural world through particular works, events, and influences (touchstones) rather than through shared types or universal properties. The relation is piecemeal (mediated by indi…

• Condemned to Meaning

  Merleau-Ponty's compressed formula for the structural condition of human existence: meaning is forced on us by virtue of being-in-the-world, and yet meaning is never guaranteed against non-sense, error, or breakdown. The phrase first appea…

• Conditioned Freedom

  Merleau-Ponty's doctrine of freedom in Part Three Ch III of Phenomenology of Perception — a doctrine positioned against Sartre's "total freedom" of Being and Nothingness (1943) without ever naming Sartre. The slogan MP extracts and rejects…

• Conquering Language (langage conquérant)

  Merleau-Ponty's name for speech that sets up a new signification within a "language machine [machine de langage] / apparatus [un appareil]" built from old signs — an apparatus that "sometimes gives more and sometimes less than what one put…

• Consciousness of Life as Consciousness of Death

  Merleau-Ponty's compressed formula from "Hegel's Existentialism" (Chapter 5 of Sense and Non-Sense, Les Temps Modernes No. 7, April 1946): "consciousness of life, taken radically, is consciousness of death" (p. 66). For there to be a consc…

• Constituting vs Instituting Subject

  The paradigm-shift thesis that Merleau-Ponty's 1954–55 institution-concept marks not an internal development of Husserlian Stiftung but a near-antagonist of the constituting subject of Husserlian-Cartesian transcendental phenomenology. The…

• Contingency of the Future

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the structural condition of historical time as it bears on political legitimacy and political guilt. There is no science of the future: every political reading of a situation is unavoidably a wager that may turn ou…

• Convergence Thesis (MP)

  Merleau-Ponty's methodological doctrine articulated in chapter 6 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy (1950–52): twentieth-century scientific psychology and abstract philosophy were born as opposed and thereby complicit; they have converged me…

• Correctness of Names (Orthotēs Onomatōn)

  The question the Cratylus is built around: what makes this the right name for that? Plato stages two answers — Hermogenes' conventionalism (a name is correct by agreement) and Cratylus' naturalism (each name names by nature) — and through…

• Counter-Tradition

  Gary Brent Madison's thesis (Appendix II of his The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, 1981 — originally a 1977 Fredericton paper): there is a parallel philosophical tradition in Western thought distinct from the dominant rationalist Traditio…

• Courage (Andreia)

  Andreia — literally "manliness," of wide scope (military prowess its core but extending to endurance against pain, pleasure, desire, and fear) — is the virtue the Laches tries and fails to define. Two distinguished generals, Laches and Nic…

• Creation *ex nihilo* (Materialist, Nancy)

  Nancy's redeployment of the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo as a materialist doctrine. It does not mean that the world is produced out of some pre-existing nothing by a powerful artisan-God; rather, it means the world has no presu…

• Creative Evolution (true vs. false evolutionism)

  Beyond the title of Bergson's book and the doctrine of the élan vital, "creative evolution" names a method and a thesis about reality: that evolution is a genuine creation of the unforeseeable, and that grasping it requires pursuing the th…

• Crisis of the European Sciences

  Husserl's diagnosis, in the Crisis (1936/1954), of a crisis that is not a crisis of the sciences' rigour or success but of their meaning for human life. The positive sciences flourish; what has collapsed is their bearing on the "problems o…

• Cristallisation

  Merleau-Ponty's cardinal anti-Sartre concept, appropriated from Stendhal's De l'Amour (1822) via Breton's L'Amour fou (1937). Cristallisation names the passive-active process by which the loved object (and, generalized, every perceived thi…

• Cultural World

  The "cultural world" is the philosophical problem-space of how shared meanings are produced, transmitted, and inhabited across time. Husserl's Crisis §9 treats geometry as exemplary for "the entire cultural world" (Husserl 366, 368), assum…

• Culturalism (Merleau-Ponty)

  Merleau-Ponty's appropriation, in the 1949–52 Sorbonne lectures, of the American "cultural sociology" tradition (Kardiner, Linton, Mead, Erikson, Du Bois) as the methodological framework for relating psyche, family, and society. Distinguis…

• Das Man (The They)

  Heidegger's name for the Wer (who) of everyday Dasein — not a sociological aggregate or "the masses" but an Existenzial: a structural-existential feature of how Dasein is. "Jeder ist der Andere und Keiner er selbst. Das Man, mit dem sich d…

• Dasein

  Heidegger's technical term — coined as a reiner Seinsausdruck (pure being-expression) — for the entity we ourselves each are, distinguished from all other entities by the fact that its own being is at issue for it. Dasein is not "human bei…

• Daseyn (Hegel)

  Hegel's Daseyn (modern German Dasein; English: "determinate being," "being-there," sometimes "existent being") is the second major category of the Doctrine of Being — Seyn mit einer Bestimmtheit (being with a determinacy). It is the result…

• Daß/Was Distinction

  Schelling's 1850 Quelle lecture distinguishes two "aspects" of what Kant had called the Ideal of Pure Reason: (A) the Ideal qua Reason — the "completely determinate concept [Inbegriff] of all possibilities," the Was ("whatness," totality o…

• Death of God

  The "death of God" is a load-bearing cross-tradition motif of the corpus — and a genealogical lineage, not a single doctrine. Its philological source is Hegel's speculative Good Friday (Phenomenology §785, "God himself is dead"), where the…

• Dedifferentiation

  Merleau-Ponty's term for the structural feature of sleep that distinguishes it from both waking consciousness and pure unconsciousness: not absence of articulation, but the collapse of the diacritical system by which waking consciousness h…

• Dehiscence

  Merleau-Ponty's technical term, borrowed from botany (the splitting of a seed pod or anther), for the body's "splitting in two" by which it opens itself to itself and to the world. "A sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and... between…

• Depth (Profondeur)

  The central concept of "Eye and Mind" and a load-bearing term across Merleau-Ponty's late ontology. Depth is not the third spatial dimension derived from height and width (Descartes' view). It is "the experience of the reversibility of dim…

• Depth of Time (Temporal Depth)

  The temporal counterpart of spatial depth: the felt thickness of time as inherent to a perspective, not a distance representable "in profile." Décarie-Daigneault 2024 develops the structural parallel with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of s…

• der Begriff (the Concept, Hegel)

  Hegel's Begriff (capital C in English: "the Concept") is the central category of the Subjective Logic and the truth into which substance dialectically resolves itself. It is not what Kantian, Fregean, or ordinary-language usage calls a "co…

• Die absolute Idee (the absolute Idea)

  The absolute Idee is the closing category of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik and the system's self-reflective closure — the chapter (GW 12 pp. 236–253) where Hegel reads the entire WdL retroactively as the unfolding of the speculative metho…

• die Idee (the Idea, Hegel)

  Die Idee — the Idea — is the third and culminating moment of the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 173–253), positioned after Subjectivität (Begriff / Urtheil / Schluß) and Objectivität (Mechanism / Chemism / Teleology). The Idea is the a…

• Die Sache selbst

  Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Preface is the philological source of die Sache selbst — "the matter itself" / "the crux of the matter" / "what is at stake" — as a methodological imperative within German philosophy. Pinkard preserve…

• Dimensional this (my body as bearer of dimensions)

  A V&I working-note coinage — left in English in MP's French original — for the structure by which the body, while singular and concrete (a this), is also a dimension: a level that organizes the perceptible field. The June 1960 working note…

• Dividuation

  Carbone's coinage (2016) for the condition of screen-mediated life: since "individual" etymologically means in-dividuus, "indivisible," the self that simultaneously lives in/through many screens and windows — playing many roles, maintainin…

• Donation en chair (Leibhaftigkeit)

  MP's reworking of Husserl's Leibhaftigkeit ("bodily givenness" — the presence en chair et en os of the thing in perception). Saint Aubert's Ch IV reconstructs MP's rewriting across two simultaneous accents: (a) tighter immanence — the thin…

• Double-Sided Artifact

  A heuristic distinction articulated by Décarie-Daigneault (2024), drawing on Philippe Grosos's Des profondeurs de nos cavernes (2021): an artifact understood as combining two sides — voluntary expression + collateral trace — both of which…

• Durée (Duration)

  Bergson's name for real, lived time: qualitative, continuous, indivisible, irreversible, and creative of the genuinely unforeseeable — "the continuous progression of the past, gnawing into the future and swelling up as it advances" (EC 7).…

• Economy of Donation

  Mounier's name in Personalism Ch II p. 22 for the anti-economic economy of the person: "The vitality of the personal impulse is to be found neither in self-defence (as in petty-bourgeois individualism) nor in life-and-death struggle (as wi…

• Effective History (Wirkungsgeschichte)

  Effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte, "history of effect") is Gadamer's name for the way history is already at work in all understanding, prior to and beneath any reflective awareness of it: "the power of effective history does not depend…

• Elenchus (Socratic Refutation)

  The elenchus (ἔλεγχος — "cross-examination," "testing," "refutation") is the question-and-answer procedure that gives Plato's early dialogues their shared form: Socrates elicits a confident definition from an interlocutor, draws out its co…

• Embodied Act of Framing

  Lisa van Sorge's (2025) signature concept and the constructive thesis of her synthesis of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida for a contemporary phenomenological aesthetics. Embodied act of framing names painting reread as the embodied subject's two…

• Empiètement (Encroachment)

  MP's figure for the overlap between terms that a Cartesian ontology would require to be distinct — self/other, inside/outside, flesh/being, soul/body, perception/motricity. Saint Aubert elevates the figure to method-defining status on the…

• Encounter (Deleuze)

  Deleuze's concept (chiefly Difference and Repetition 1968) for an event that occurs at the surface — that is, in the present — and which commands the opening of a certain depth in the virtual past. The encounter is what "forces us to think…

• End of Philosophy (das Ende der Philosophie)

  Heidegger's late thesis: philosophy as metaphysics — from Plato through Hegel-Husserl-Nietzsche-Marx — has ended in the present age. The end is Vollendung, not cessation: a Versammlung in die äußerste Möglichkeit (gathering into outermost…

• Engagement through Disengagement

  Merleau-Ponty's marginal phrase at L6 [80] of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953): "Engagement through disengagement. (the l'Académie Française episode)." Initially glossing Valéry's late acceptance of life (in particul…

• Enteignis (Heidegger's expropriation belonging to the Ereignis)

  Heidegger's late-Heidegger term for the self-withdrawing that belongs to the Ereignis as such — not as a contingent privation but as the heart of the Eignis. Locus classicus: Zeit und Sein (1962) pp. 22–23: "Zum Ereignis als solchem gehört…

• Entäußerung (Relinquishment / Kenosis)

  Entäußerung is Hegel's term for the self-relinquishing that IS the actuality of substance — not a defective state to be overcome, but the very form in which spirit gives itself any actuality at all. Pinkard's 2018 Cambridge translation ren…

• Enveloping-Enveloped

  A late-MP figure of mutual implication in which two terms each enclose-and-are-enclosed by the other, neither serving as outer container nor inner contained — a cross-vocabulary register that surfaces under several names: enveloping-envelo…

• Epoché and the Transcendental Reduction

  Husserl's methodical operation of abstention (Greek ἐποχή, "suspension of judgment"): a deliberate putting-out-of-play of the natural belief in the world, which makes possible the transcendental reduction — the disclosure of the world pure…

• Ereignis (Heidegger's advent of Being)

  Heidegger's late term — typically rendered "advent of Being" or "appropriating event" — for the non-causal event by which Being gives itself, ereignet sich, in a "vertical" history that does not unfold along the horizontal axis of cause an…

• Eristic (the Art of Contention)

  Eristic (eristikē) is the combative question-and-answer art whose end is victory, indifferent to truth — the power "to refute whatever may be said, no matter whether it is true or false" (Euthydemus 272b). The Euthydemus is the corpus's fu…

• Erkennen (Cognition, Hegel)

  Erkennen — Cognition — is the second shape of die Idee in the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 192–243), positioned between Life and the absolute Idea. Cognition is the Idea split into the theoretical (subjective Idea seeking the Object)…

• Eros (Platonic Love)

  Plato's account of love, developed in the Symposium through Diotima's teaching (reported by Socrates). Its central original move is to redefine love away from the beautiful beloved (the object) toward the needy lover (the desirer): love is…

• Erregender Zwiespalt zwischen Wahrheit und Kunst

  The "agitating discord" between art and truth at the heart of Nietzsche's late metaphysics. Nietzsche himself names it in 1888: "Über das Verhältnis der Kunst zur Wahrheit bin ich am frühesten ernst geworden: und noch jetzt stehe ich mit e…

• Erscheinung (Appearance, Hegel)

  Erscheinung — appearance — is the second moment of the Zweyter Abschnitt of the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 5466–5635), positioned between Existenz (and the Ding-doctrine) and wesentliches Verhältnis. Hegel's cardinal thesis: "Das Wesen…

• Es gibt (the late-Heidegger Sprachgebrauch-shift)

  Heidegger's cardinal late-Heidegger Sprachgebrauch-shift: from "Sein ist / Zeit ist" to "Es gibt Sein / Es gibt Zeit." The shift is the gate to thinking Sein ohne das Seiende — Sein "without recourse to grounding from beings." Locus classi…

• Essential Prematureness of Revolution

  Merleau-Ponty's claim in Chapter 4 of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), against Marxist theories of revolution-as-maturation: revolutions are not "anticipations" of conditions that will one day be mature; they have an essential premature…

• Eternal Recurrence

  Nietzsche's thought that the same events will repeat, identically, an infinite number of times — first introduced in The Gay Science §341 (the "greatest weight") and developed through Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the notebooks, and Ecce Homo. N…

• Europe as the Crisis of Play

  Chouraqui's hypothesis (in "Europe as the Crisis of Play", 2025) about the essence of European modernity: that it is the cultural invention of seriousness, and therefore that Europe is best defined as the graveyard of play. Europe is not a…

• Evil as Positive Reversal (Schelling)

  Schelling's distinctive theory of evil from the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809): evil is not privation (Augustine, Leibniz) and not mere sensuality ("Monotheletism") but the positive reversal of the in…

• Existenz (Existence, Hegel)

  Existenz — existence — is the first category of the Zweyter Abschnitt of the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 5266–5306). Existenz is mediated immediacy that has come forth from Grund: not a property of Wesen but Wesen's externalization, the…

• Experimental Platonism

  Ruyer's coinage — originally for the phenomenon of supra-normal stimuli in ethology (eggs that are "more spotted than spotted eggs," dummies "more typical than typical" that elicit stronger responses from animals than the natural objects t…

• Expressive Will (poussée, drive to speak)

  The affective and volitional substrate of lateral universality in Merleau-Ponty's account of language. Linguistic universality is not first a structural-conceptual feature shared by languages; it is a drive (poussée) of speaking subjects w…

• Expressivity (expressivité)

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the operation by which a phenomenon's internal arrangement indicates another phenomenon — at the perceptual register (the Thursday course 1953 definition: "the property that a phenomenon has through its internal ar…

• Exscription

  Nancy's neologism (ex-scription, l'exscrit) for the writing-out of the body that exceeds inscription — the moment in writing where what is written exceeds writing itself, where sense exscribes the body that writing claims to inscribe. The…

• Fait Primitif

  Maine de Biran's concept from the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie et sur ses rapports avec l'étude de la nature, retained by Merleau-Ponty from his 1947-48 ENS lectures on Biran through the November 1960 V&I working notes. The f…

• Faith and Good Faith (MP's 1946 formulation)

  Merleau-Ponty's resolution of the apparent opposition between faith (unreserved commitment going beyond what is given) and good faith (sincerity in saying what one thinks). Developed in the 1946 essay "Faith and Good Faith" (Chapter 12 of…

• Fetishistic Theory of Care (Nihilism)

  Chouraqui's redescription of nihilism (in "Europe as the Crisis of Play", 2025) as, "at heart, a fetishistic theory of care." On this reading, nihilism is not first a doctrine about value's absence but a doctrine about care's grounds: to c…

• Figuratifs

  Merleau-Ponty's cardinal late-manuscript concept (1959-1960) for the non-figural conditions of visibility: fond, ombre, horizon, profondeur, silence, reflet, relief, éclairage, niveau. These are not figures and not nothing — they are what…

• Figure-Ground Relationship

  The phenomenal-organizational structure first analyzed by Edgar Rubin (1915) and integrated into Gestalt theory by Koffka: within any visual field, some regions become figure (object-like, present, locatable, meaningful) while others becom…

• Fire / Ignition / Spark

  A HUB motif of flesh-as-element's Presocratic register, tracking the genealogy Heraclitus → Schelling → Merleau-Ponty through which "fire" comes to name the transition (the spark between sensing and sensible, the ignition that converts lat…

• Flesh as Element

  Merleau-Ponty's central late ontological concept: the flesh (chair) is not matter, not mind, not substance, but an "element" in the Presocratic sense — water, earth, fire, air. The canonical definition is in V&I Ch 4, p. 139-140: "What we…

• Fold (Pli)

  Merleau-Ponty's figure for the ontological structure by which the multiple comes from the one without external cutting — the continuum of form and content that dissolves the dualism/monism dilemma. V&I Ch. 4 Section "Folds" (pp. ~139–141)…

• Fragile Skin of the World

  The title-figure of Nancy's last book (The Fragile Skin of the World, 2020/2021). The world is neither animal (Stoic immanent finality) nor machine (Enlightenment external causality) but us; it has no skin of its own and is "the factorial…

• Freedom (Hegel)

  Freyheit — freedom — is the cardinal categorial achievement of the Concept in the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12). The cardinal formulations:

• Freedom of the Stone (Nancy)

  Nancy's claim — anchored at the end-fragment of The Experience of Freedom (EF 158–60) — that freedom extends not only to all living beings but also to the stone. The claim is intelligible only after a radical de-subjectivisation of freedom…

• Freie Entlassung (free release into Nature)

  The freie Entlassung is the closing non-transition of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik (GW 12 p. 253): the absolute Idea "entläßt sich frey" into Nature. This is not a Werden or Uebergehen of the kind seen in the Doctrine of Being — Hegel ma…

• Freud Without Demonology

  Merleau-Ponty's recurrent methodological stance toward psychoanalysis: keep the clinical discovery, refuse the metapsychology, reread perceptually. The phrase "demonology" is Freud's own self-criticism — he admitted that positing a second…

• Fundamental Thought in Art

  Merleau-Ponty's term for the implicit ontological inquiry carried by literature, painting, and music — a genuine philosophical content that is not translated philosophy but a disclosure of new relationships to Being that official philosoph…

• Fusion of Horizons (Horizontverschmelzung)

  The fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) is Gadamer's name for what happens in understanding: the apparent horizon of the present and the apparent horizon of the past (the text, the tradition) are not two self-standing standpoints to…

• Fürsichseyn (Being-for-Self)

  Fürsichseyn — being-for-self — is the third and final chapter of the Bestimmtheit / Qualität section of the Doctrine of Being (GW 21 raw 2439–2842). It is the truth of Daseyn: a being-for-itself in which all otherness has been internalized…

• Ge-stell (Enframing)

  Heidegger's name for the Wesen der Technik — not technology as equipment but the mode of Being in which everything (including the human) shows up as Bestand (standing-reserve), available for ordering and optimization. The hyphenation Ge-st…

• Gegensatz (Opposition, Hegel)

  Gegensatz — opposition (positive / negative) — is the third of the four Reflexionsbestimmungen in the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 4724 ff.). Gegensatz introduces positive and negative as moments that each contain the other: positive is…

• Genealogy

  The method Nietzsche names and practices in On the Genealogy of Morality — a critical history of the descent (Herkunft) of moral values that asks not "are they true?" but "where did they come from, and what are they worth for life?" Its wa…

• Generative Passivity

  The ontological origin of sense in nonsense — not mere inertness or absence of activity, but a "generative temporal openness" that precedes and grounds all constituting activity. Generative passivity names the emergence of activity from no…

• Gesetz der Erscheinung (Law of Appearance, Hegel)

  The Gesetz der Erscheinung — law of appearance — is a sub-doctrine of the Erscheinung-section of the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 5488–5544). Hegel's cardinal characterization: a Newtonian-style law (e.g., spaces traversed in fall as squ…

• Gestalt Principles of Unification

  The set of perceptual-organizational factors — first identified by Wertheimer (1923) and developed across Gestalt psychology (Koffka, Köhler, Kanizsa, Metzger) — that determine how elements within the visual field are grouped into unified…

• Gestural Expression

  Merleau-Ponty's Sorbonne-period doctrine (chapter 8 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 1951–52) of the body as the medium of intersubjectivity through gesture: "the body inhabited by meaning"; "to perceive the other is to decipher a languag…

• Gloria

  Merleau-Ponty's term — borrowed from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, where it is Maria's word for the moment of harmony in which "events respond to their will" — for the moment of victory in commitment under contingency. The gloria "m…

• Good Ambiguity / Bad Ambiguity

  The structural distinction at the heart of Merleau-Ponty's 1960-61 course on "Philosophy and Nonphilosophy since Hegel." Hegel's 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit contains a good ambiguity — the ineinander of phenomenology and the absolute, liv…

• Good European

  Nietzsche's name for the supra-national cultural type that the homogenization of Europe is producing, and which he opposes to nationalism, "fatherlandishness," and the "insanity of nationality." In Beyond Good and Evil the "good Europeans"…

• Grain du sensible

  Merleau-Ponty's concept for the optimum at which perception stops exploration and adheres — the écart between my body and the perceived that makes the perceived inépuisable but present. The grain is what arrests the caress, what defines th…

• Granite of Fate

  Nietzsche's figure from Beyond Good and Evil §231 for the uneducable bodily substratum of the individual — the fixed aspect of the self that all subsequent development can redirect but neither create nor erase. "Deep in us, really 'down th…

• Gregarious vs. Singular

  The opposition between the gregarious (grégaire — that which conserves the species: exchangeable, communicable, intelligible) and the singular (the cas singulier / fortuitous case — unexchangeable, mute, unintelligible) is the second of th…

• Ground / Existence Distinction (Schelling)

  Schelling's central original distinction, articulated in the "Deduction from the Philosophy of Nature" section of the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809): "being in so far as it exists" (Existenz) vs. "bei…

• Großer Stil

  Nietzsche's name, in his late writings, for the highest mode of artistic creation: not classicism, not romanticism, but mastery over a chaos that is one's own. Heidegger reads großer Stil in Nietzsche I I.14-15 as the form-giving counter-s…

• Grund (Ground / Sufficient Reason, Hegel)

  Grund — ground, sufficient reason — is the third and closing chapter of the Erster Abschnitt of the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 4924–5263). Grund is what remains when the four Reflexionsbestimmungen (Identität → Verschiedenheit → Gegens…

• Guilt and Debt

  Nietzsche's genealogical thesis, from the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, that the moral concept of guilt (Schuld) descends from the material concept of debt (Schulden) — the German pun is the argument's pivot. "Have these pr…

• Habitual Body

  The habitual body (corps habituel) is Merleau-Ponty's technical term in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) for the body considered as a sedimented field of acquired postures, capacities, and orientations — the body of "I can" rather than t…

• Haecceity

  A scholastic term — Latin haecceitas, literally "thisness" — that Merleau-Ponty deploys throughout Phenomenology of Perception without ever defining or naming its source. In MP's hands, haecceity is the irreducibly singular pole of percept…

• Haptical Différance

  Derrida's positive thesis (named at On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy p. 240) for the spacing, interruption, interposition, detour constitutive of any contact. Against the haptocentric tradition's thesis of immediate self-touch, Derrida argues th…

• Haptico-Transcendental Reduction

  Derrida's diagnostic name (in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy §13) for the risk — visible most clearly in Nancy's own Corpus and Une pensée finie — of reducing sense to touch as the transcendental of all sense. The Nancean formula "Sense IS tou…

• Haptocentrism

  Haptocentrism is Derrida's diagnostic name (coined in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 2000, p. 52) for the philosophical tradition that privileges touch (Greek haphē) as the sense of immediacy, contact, presence, and self-relation — making tou…

• Healing Schneider

  Chouraqui's 2025 name for the positive side of Merleau-Ponty's ethical project: opposing and undoing the agnosiastic tendencies that MP diagnoses across clinical, political, existential, and ontological registers. The project is not buildi…

• Heidegger as Silenced Interlocutor

  The philological-corrective thesis that MP's reading of Heidegger was archivally thin — and that the dominant "Heideggerian turn" reading of late MP projects backwards from late stylistic resonances onto a philosophical genesis that came f…

• Herd Morality

  Nietzsche's name for the morality of the herd animal — the valuation that serves the preservation of the community by leveling its members, prizing obedience, compassion, and equality, and treating itself as morality as such. The central t…

• Hermeneutic Experience (Erfahrung)

  Gadamer argues that historically effected consciousness "has the structure of experience (Erfahrung)" — and that genuine experience is dialectical, negative, and finite. "Every experience worthy of the name thwarts an expectation"; experie…

• Hermeneutical Reverie

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the method proper to the understanding of the positive symbol — a mode of philosophical attention that neither decodes (Freud) nor unmasks (Sartre) but accompanies the echoing of meaning through totality. "Method p…

• Hermeneutics (Philosophical)

  Hermeneutics is the theory of understanding and interpretation. In Gadamer's Truth and Method it is decisively transformed: from an art or technique of correct interpretation (the older theological, legal, and philological hermeneutics; Sc…

• High-Altitude Thinking

  See also pensee-de-survol (corpus-level HUB) — the cross-corpus structural negation-target across MP's entire career, with the four rejected variants (Brunschvicgian, Piagetian, liberal-political, theological-explicative) and the impossibl…

• Hinge

  Merleau-Ponty's figure (charnière, gond, pivot) for a structure that articulates two terms without reducing either to the other — a structure that produces its terms as poles rather than mediating between pre-existing ones. The hinge appea…

• Historical Responsibility

  Merleau-Ponty's name for a positive philosophical category that exceeds liberal "intention/circumstance" distinctions: the political agent is responsible for the role he plays as it is read by his victims and his inheritors — for what othe…

• Homme en porte-à-faux

  Merleau-Ponty's 1946 figure for the structural cantilevering of human existence — being-and-rien, being-here-and-nowhere, voué-à-l'être-and-défaut-dans-l'être, néant-et-être all at once and not in turn. Articulated in the Brussels conferen…

• Homoclite / Heteroclite

  Foucault's terms — in Les Mots et les choses (MC 9/xvii) and Le souci de soi — generalized by Leonard Lawlor (Ch 2 of Thinking through French Philosophy) into a spatialization-of-time apparatus that maps the diffraction between Merleau-Pon…

• Homoiōsis Theōi (Becoming Like God)

  Homoiōsis theōi — "becoming like god so far as possible" (176b) — is the ethical telos Plato lodges, surprisingly, inside the epistemology of the Theaetetus. In the Digression (172c–177c) Socrates sets two lives against each other: the phi…

• Horizon (Phenomenological)

  The Husserlian phenomenological structure by which any determinate object is given against an indeterminate-but-co-present background that conditions its perceptual sense, taken up and transformed in Merleau-Ponty's late ontology as the di…

• Horizons of Language (vs. Limits)

  Kee 2025's reformulation of Merleau-Ponty's anti-relativist response in the early 1950s and PbP: against Wittgenstein's "the limits of my language are the limits of my world," MP holds that the horizons of my language are the horizons of m…

• Humanism in Extension / Humanism in Intension

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947 political distinction between two senses of "humanism." Humanism in intension ("intensive") is the love of humanity as embodied in a few — the guardians of Western culture who preserve its "treasure" and whose status i…

• Hyper-dialectic

  Merleau-Ponty's term (hyperdialectique) for a dialectic that overcomes "bad dialectic" — the dialectic that "thinks it recomposes being by a thetic thought, by an assemblage of statements, by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis" (V&I Ch 2, p…

• Hyper-objet (Saint Aubert)

  Emmanuel de Saint Aubert's own constructive concept introduced in Être et chair II Ch III § 3 ("Portance et anti-portance des ultra-choses au-delà de Merleau-Ponty") as a correction to Merleau-Ponty's treatment of the ultra-chose. The hype…

• Hyper-reflection

  Merleau-Ponty's name (sur-réflexion) for the operation that radicalizes reflection by taking itself and the changes it introduces into the spectacle into account. Introduced in The Visible and the Invisible Ch 1 (p. 38) as the alternative…

• Idea-as-dimension (the idea is the level)

  In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty deploys an unusual ontological identification: the Idea — the musical idea, the idea of light, the idea of a colour — is a level or dimension of the visible, not a content above or behind it.…

• Ideal Objectivity (The Origin of Geometry)

  The concept worked out in "The Origin of Geometry" (Crisis Appendix VI — the text Derrida famously introduced): an ideal objectivity is a spiritual product, such as the Pythagorean theorem, that "exists only once," is omnitemporally the sa…

• Identität (Identity, Hegel)

  Identität is the first of the four Reflexionsbestimmungen in the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 4574–4634). Hegel's cardinal thesis: "Die Identität ist also an ihr selbst absolute Nichtidentität" (raw 4598) — identity at itself is absolute…

• Idole (anti-figuratif)

  Merleau-Ponty's polemical name for the figure without fond — the image-fetish that pretends to total self-presence and thereby blocks access to the figuratif-register of being. The idole is the epistemic equivalent of Descartes' idée clair…

• Imaginary (Merleau-Ponty)

  MP's late account of the imaginary — distinct from any regional psychology of imagination — names a structural-ontological register in which the mode of being characteristic of imagination (ubiquity, hovering, inexhaustibility, presence-ab…

• Imperception

  The structural non-givenness of the perceptual levels and backgrounds that make perception possible. "Consciousness is, if you like, synonymous with imperception. Consciousness of a figure is consciousness without knowledge of the backgrou…

• Imperfecting Expression

  David Morris's signature deformation of Smolin's neo-Leibnizian principle ("maximize difference, against identity of indiscernibles"). Morris's principle: "The principle isn't maximizing difference but 'imperfecting expression'" (morris-20…

• Implex

  A term Merleau-Ponty borrows from Paul Valéry (alongside "chiasm") to name the body's anonymous, subconscious capacity — the optic nerves, musculature, ecological systems that are not activities but potentials for difference. Valéry coins…

• Imposture (three-fold, MP's reading of Valéry)

  Merleau-Ponty's name (drawn from Valéry but systematized) for the three constitutive deceptions of literary writing diagnosed in lectures 4–5 of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953): (1) the writer is mastered by what hi…

• In-itself-for-us

  Merleau-Ponty's name (PoP 336) for the paradoxical category the perceived thing belongs to: a thing that is the correlate of my body and that "denies that it is" such a correlate (PP 339). Morin argues this is not a yoking of two pre-given…

• Inconscient primordial (Inconscient d'ek-stase)

  The late MP's term for a carnal unconscious that replaces — not supplements — consciousness as the operator of the être à la chose par l'intermédiaire du corps. Saint Aubert's reading (E&C II Ch VI) argues that the Notes sur le corps (1956…

• Incorporation of Truth

  Nietzsche's term (Einverleibung der Wahrheit) for the method by which the knowledge that truth is falsification is converted from an intellectual item into embodied, instinctive orientation. Introduced in The Gay Science (§§11, 110), the p…

• Indirect Language

  Merleau-Ponty's thesis (developed in "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence," 1952, and in "On the Phenomenology of Language," 1951) that all language is indirect and allusive — that "the idea of a complete expression is nonsensical"…

• Indirect Ontology

  The philosophical problem-space of how to do ontology without standing outside Being to describe it — and the family of methods MP develops to solve it. Indirect ontology refuses both the Heideggerian conceit of direct ontological speech a…

• Indirect or Objective Lyricism

  Ramon Fernandez's term, enthusiastically endorsed by Merleau-Ponty in the 1953 Collège course The Literary Use of Language (Lecture 14): "a way of arousing emotion which involves showing facts, things, without saying their effect." Three e…

• Individu de classe

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947–48 reading of Marx's Idéologie allemande: the individu de classe is the On (impersonal "one") that mediates the historical subject and the historical-economic conditions — "porté à la fois par conditions matérielles et…

• Individualism of Love

  Simmel's spectrum from love-by-type to love-by-individuality — anchored in the contrast between Goethe's two cardinal couples: Faust/Gretchen (love by type; replaceability remains possible in principle) and Eduard/Ottilie (in Wahlverwandts…

• Ineinander

  German for "one inside the other" or "interleaving." In Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy, the Ineinander names the fundamental ontological structure: the mutual implication, overlapping, and interlocking of self and world, visible and invis…

• Infantile Polymorphism

  Merleau-Ponty's positive concept replacing "infantile mentality" (Lévy-Bruhl, Charles Blondel) and "small adult" (classical psychology's assimilationist view). The cardinal formula (CPP ch. 7 §V, line 4942): "There is no infantile mentalit…

• Initiation (the opening of a dimension)

  In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty deploys the term initiation at one of the rare moments where he gives a definition outright: initiation names the operation by which a perceptible (or affective, or linguistic) level is estab…

• Innere Sprachform

  Wilhelm von Humboldt's German technical term — innere Sprachform, "inner form of language" — taken up by Merleau-Ponty via Kurt Goldstein's Language and Language Disturbances (1948) as a name for the global articulating structure of a lang…

• Inorganic Body of Sense (Nancy)

  Nancy's name (Sense of the World 61–2) for the totality of material bodies articulated through their spacings, mutual exposures, and weighings — without organic unity or functional whole. "There are only material bodies, then, and they mak…

• Institution

  Merleau-Ponty's counter-concept to Husserlian constitution, developed in his 1954–55 Collège de France course "Institution in Personal and Public History." For a constituting subject, "there are only the objects which it has itself constit…

• Institution of the Proletariat

  Tamara Caraus's coinage for Merleau-Ponty's reabsorbed proletariat: the proletariat freed from party, dictatorship, and historical-mission persists as a unique institution whose distinctive function is the intensification of the question w…

• Intellect, Instinct, Intuition

  In Creative Evolution Bergson treats intellect, instinct, and intuition not as three rungs of one ladder but as divergent directions of a single consciousness, differing in kind not in degree — "the major error, the one that has been passe…

• Intentional Arc

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the unity that underlies perception, intelligence, memory, projection, desire, and motility — the "vector" that binds the life of consciousness into a single intending-of-the-world. Introduced in Part One Ch III.j…

• Intentional Transgression

  Husserl's term (intentionales Überschreiten, from the Cartesian Meditations) as taken up and generalized by Merleau-Ponty in Signs' "The Philosopher and His Shadow" (1959) and "On the Phenomenology of Language" (1951). Intentional transgre…

• Interactive Ontology

  Caleb Faul's (2024) coined term for the metaphysical view his reading of Rothenberg's Three Heads through MP's institution-logic motivates. Things are neither static (complete all at once) nor self-contained (sealed off from interaction);…

• Interanimality

  Merleau-Ponty's working-note term (interanimalité) for intercorporeity generalized beyond the human: the species-level dimension of carnal life, in which animals of the same species — and, the later notes suggest, across species — share a…

• Intercorporeity

  Merleau-Ponty's name (intercorporéité) for the structure that makes the other accessible — not as a foreign for-itself but as another locus of the same reversibility in which I am already caught up. Intercorporeity is reversibility extende…

• Interdependence Claim

  Felipe León's signature coinage for the bidirectional reciprocal-foundation thesis Merleau-Ponty draws from Saussure: instituted language requires speaking subjects for its existence qua social institution, AND speaking subjects require an…

• Interior God / Exterior God (Incarnation Read Socially)

  Merleau-Ponty's structural reading of Catholicism's spiritual ambiguity in Sense and Non-Sense's "Faith and Good Faith" (Chapter 12, Les Temps modernes No. 5, February 1946). The Augustinian interior God ("turn inward... truth dwells withi…

• Interrogation

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the methodological mode of The Visible and the Invisible — philosophy not as doubt, not as awakening of consciousness, not as essence-intuition, but as question-savoir ("question-knowing"): a knowing whose form is…

• Interworld

  The interworld (l'intermonde) is Merleau-Ponty's name, in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955, Ch 5), for the middle order between men and things: "history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made" (AD 200). It is the order that Sartre's ontology of cog…

• Intra-Ontology (Indirect Ontology)

  Merleau-Ponty's method-concept for an ontology that does not stand outside Being to describe it but operates within it — "Being in the beings." MP's formulation from the February 1959 V&I working note: "One cannot make a direct ontology. M…

• Investment as Civilizational Principle (Nancy)

  Nancy's late diagnosis of the Western civilizational sequence — Roman enterprise → Christian transfer-and-galvanization → bourgeois investment → present automation — as the systematic development of a single principle: investment. From Lat…

• Involuntary Literature

  Merleau-Ponty's name for what Stendhal "stumbles into" in his Journal (1804–05) — the discovery, "spontaneously and almost unknowingly," of internal monologue as the technique that resolves the life-impasse of cynicism-vs-rapture. Not Roma…

• Kehre (the Turn)

  The Kehre names a structural reversal internal to the Sachverhalt of Sein und Zeit / Zeit und Sein — not a biographical change of standpoint in Heidegger's thinking but the turning within Being itself whereby the Vergessenheit (forgetfulne…

• Khôra

  The third kind (triton genos) introduced in Plato's Timaeus (48e–53c) beside being (Form) and becoming (copy): the receptacle "in which" all becoming appears — named by an irreducible cluster of metaphors (receptacle hypodochē, "wetnurse"…

• Kinetic Melody of Behavior

  The melody-figure deployed by Merleau-Ponty in The Structure of Behavior (1942) as the philosophical model for the temporal Gestalt of behavior, learning, perception, and organic life. SB is the documented 1942 origin site of MP's signatur…

• Knotenlinie (Nodal Line of Measure-Relations)

  The Knotenlinie von Maßverhältnissen — nodal line of measure-relations — is Hegel's signature claim in the Maß-section of the Doctrine of Being (GW 21 raw ~5150–5300): quantitative changes accumulate continuously up to a node, at which a q…

• Kybernetik as Grundwissenschaft

  Heidegger's 1964 thesis: Cybernetics is the new Grundwissenschaft (fundamental science) that determines and steers the dispersed sciences in the completed-philosophy age. Locus classicus: "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denke…

• Lateral Universal

  Merleau-Ponty's alternative to the "overarching universal" of classical rationalism and of Husserl's early eidetic phenomenology. A lateral universal is acquired between cultures, philosophies, or perspectives rather than given above them;…

• Law of Tact

  Derrida's name (in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy §4, p. 77) for the quasi-transcendental commandment to touch without touching, prior to any religion, culture, or ritual abstinence. The law of tact is "the law itself, the law of the law": "on…

• Leben (Life, Hegel — logical category)

  Das Leben — Life — is the first concrete shape of die Idee in the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 179–198). Crucially: Hegel insists that the logical concept of Life is to be distinguished from Naturleben (the life of nature, treated in…

• Lebenswelt

  Husserl's concept of the pre-theoretical lifeworld — the world as it is lived before any scientific or philosophical idealization. In Merleau-Ponty's reading, the Lebenswelt is not merely one "layer" of experience among others but is incre…

• Leitfrage and Grundfrage

  Heidegger's architectonic distinction between two questions of philosophy. The Leitfrage (guiding question) is "Was ist das Seiende?" — "What is the being?" — i.e., what makes a being a being? This question, given its decisive form by Aris…

• Lethe / Verbergung

  Heidegger's late name for the Sich-verbergen (self-concealing), Verborgenheit, that belongs to ἀ-λήθεια als das Herz — as the heart, not as a mere addition or like shadow to light. Locus classicus: "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe…

• Letting-Be (laisser-être)

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the comportment that "lets the perceived world be rather than posits it" (VI 138/102) — the structural form of voyance applied to the philosophical object, and the "primordial unconsciousness" that is "the initial…

• Lichtung

  Heidegger's late name for the Offenheit (openness) — the free open — that grants any Scheinen (showing), any Zeigen (appearing), and any An- und Abwesendes (presencing or absence). Locus classicus: "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe…

• Light of the Flesh

  Merleau-Ponty's late doctrine of a "new idea of light": light inseparable from shadow, structurally diffused in the flesh rather than emanating from an intelligible sun. Developed in the preparatory notes for the 1960–61 course "Philosophy…

• Limit / Edge / Shore (Nancy)

  The closing analytic triad in Fragile Skin Ch VIII ("Taking on Board"), Nancy's master late-apparatus for thinking singular finitude in the closure of the West: limit (limite), edge (bord), shore (rive). Each names a distinct register of t…

• Linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit)

  In Part Three of Truth and Method, Gadamer makes the ontological turn to language: understanding is linguistic through and through (Sprachlichkeit). Language is "the medium of hermeneutic experience" — not a neutral instrument carrying pre…

• List der Vernunft (cunning of reason)

  The List der Vernunft — cunning of reason — is the formal-logical structure by which a finite end realizes itself by interposing an object as means between itself and the world, exposing the means to mechanical and chemical wear while the…

• Lived Gestural Expression

  Merleau-Ponty's most condensed Sorbonne-period statement on bodily expression as the medium of intersubjectivity, articulated in chapter 8 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy (1951–52). The cardinal thesis: "To perceive the other is to deciph…

• Lived Perspective

  Merleau-Ponty's term for the perspective we actually perceive, as distinct from the geometric perspective a camera (or Renaissance painter following the rules of prospettiva) would project. Lived perspective is non-Euclidean: oblique circl…

• Logique de fait

  Merleau-Ponty's 1946 figure for the rationality history exhibits in fact — without the necessity of formal logic, without the abstraction of Kantian transcendental logic, without the closure of Hegelian Wissenschaft der Logik. Logique de f…

• Logos of the Sensible

  Merleau-Ponty's 1953-54 name — written in Greek script as Λόγος du monde sensible / Λόγος perceptif — for the pre-linguistic logos that the language-acquisition thesis of Le problème de la parole presupposes. The lived sensible already has…

• Love as a Formative Category

  Simmel's thesis in On Love (a fragment) (1923): love is one of the great formative categories of existence, joining the object of knowledge, the object of faith, and the object of valuation as a fundamental category of the subject-world re…

• Machenschaft

  Heidegger's name for the mode of Being in the completed epoch of metaphysics — the form Seiendheit (beingness) takes when the Vollendung has installed Seinsverlassenheit (abandonment by Being) as the prevailing condition. Machenschaft is n…

• Maieutics (Socratic Midwifery)

  Socrates' image of his own philosophical method, given its one explicit statement in the Theaetetus (148e–151d): the art of the midwife (technē maieutikē). Socrates is himself "barren of wisdom" and "God forbids me to procreate"; his art i…

• Making Visible (Sichtbarmachen)

  Paul Klee's 1920 formula from the Schöpferische Konfession (Creative Credo) — "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible" ("Die Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar") — transformed by Merleau-Pon…

• Man, the Hero (the Contemporary Hero)

  Merleau-Ponty's existential-ethical figure of the post-1940 hero — the figure "condemned to follow out fragile meanings without either the triumph of an absolute or the relief of despair." The concept is given its concentrated statement in…

• Marionette

  The marionette is the figure where BS-I stages the undecidable threshold among mechanism, animal, human, and sovereign. "There are marionette and marionette" — the seminar's opening of S7 (p. 187). Derrida triangulates three "arts of the m…

• Marxist Machiavellianism

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947 coinage for the form of political action distinctive to Marxism: a dialectical politics that names its detours and subordinates them to a general definition of the phase, distinguishing it from "pure" Machiavellianism…

• Master and Slave Morality

  Nietzsche's typology of two value-creating types, given its locus classicus in Beyond Good and Evil §260: "There is master-morality and slave-morality." Master morality arises "under a dominating type" that feels itself "value-determining……

• Master-Slave Dialectic

  Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit §§186–196 — the first asymmetric form of recognition (Anerkennung), in which two self-consciousnesses encounter each other in a life-and-death struggle, one becomes master (Herr) by risking life, the other s…

• Mathematization of Nature

  The operation, analysed in the Crisis §9 (Husserl's single most influential section), by which Galileo reinterprets nature as a mathematical manifold — and, in doing so, surreptitiously substitutes a mathematically idealized world for the…

• Matrixed Ontology

  Kaushik's term for Merleau-Ponty's ontology understood as fundamentally symbolic — an ontology in which the symbolic-matrix is not a regional psychoanalytic concept but the ontological tissue prior to formal ontology. The matrixed ontology…

• Maß (Measure, Hegel)

  Maß (in GW 21's 1832 spelling, Maaß) is the third Abschnitt of the Doctrine of Being (GW 21 raw 4660–5571) — the categorial unity of Qualität and Quantität. A determinate quantum as qualifying — change it sufficiently and the qualitative d…

• Mechanism / Vitalism

  The classical opposition in philosophy of biology between mechanism (the organism is reducible to its physico-chemical parts and processes) and vitalism (the organism is governed by an irreducible vital principle — entelechy, dominant, and…

• Mediated Unity vs. Immediate Duality

  Leonard Lawlor's most precise structural formula for the Derrida–Deleuze diffraction (Ch 8 §§II–III of Thinking through French Philosophy, summer 2001). Mediated unity (Derrida): two sides of any opposition (presence/non-presence, expressi…

• Melting Time (temps fondant)

  David Morris's name (drawn from a Merleau-Ponty unpublished working note) for the indeterminate, invisible, undifferentiated change prior to time-orders that, through its own dynamics, generates visible, determinate time-forms. Morris's ti…

• Metamorphosis (in art)

  Malraux's central concept in The Voices of Silence: metamorphosis is a law governing the life of every work of art (p. 72). Works survive across time not by repeating their original meaning but by being recreated in each new vocabulary tha…

• Metaphoricity

  A term developed by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (Poetic of the World, Ch 5) to name the carnal-ontological capacity for analogy that grounds all linguistic metaphor in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. Metaphor is not a semantic transfer between pr…

• Metaphysische Grundstellung

  Heidegger's name for the structural form a metaphysical position takes within the Leitfrage-history. A Grundstellung is not a "viewpoint" or "doctrine" but the four-fold articulation by which a thinker takes a Stand (stance) within the una…

• Mimesis (Imitation)

  Mimēsis — imitation, copying, representation — is one of Plato's most consequential and most ambivalent concepts. In the Wave-1 dialogues it does two distinct kinds of work: in the Cratylus a name is a vocal imitation of a thing's being/es…

• Modal Triad (Wirklichkeit / Möglichkeit / Notwendigkeit, Hegel)

  The modal triad — Wirklichkeit (actuality), Möglichkeit (possibility), Notwendigkeit (necessity) — structures the central chapter of the Dritter Abschnitt of the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 5851–6131). Each term is a categorial moment,…

• Mondialisation of Flesh

  Derrida's name (at On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy p. 247) for the over-extension of Husserlian Leiblichkeit — the globalization (mondialisation) of chair / flesh — beyond the self-affecting body to "things," "essences," and modes of experience…

• More-than-Life

  Simmel's philosophical structure of life's self-transcendence: life produces, from its own energies, autonomous strata that exceed mere life — cognitive, religious, aesthetic, social, technical, normative — and these trans-vital strata ret…

• Motivation

  Merleau-Ponty's technical name for the phenomenal connection between experience and what it reveals — the "third term" between causal determination and logical entailment that governs the phenomenal-field. Borrowed from Husserl's Ideen II…

• Motor Intentionality

  Merleau-Ponty's name (via Husserl's Bewegungsentwurf, "motor project") for the body's pre-reflective directedness toward a practical task — the "third term" between mechanism and representation that Part One of Phenomenology of Perception…

• Multilateral Emergence

  A concept introduced by Décarie-Daigneault (2025) to describe the non-teleological character of emergence in organic systems as theorized by both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Standard scientific accounts treat emergence as progressive comple…

• Museum Without Walls

  Malraux's coinage (le musée imaginaire, 1947) for the virtual universal collection that photographic reproduction has produced. The English title of Stuart Gilbert's translation of Les Voix du silence (1953) gives the phrase its anglophone…

• Mutual Implication as Ontological Starting Structure

  The problem-space named by the question: how can two terms — self and world, visible and invisible, animal and human, past and present, philosopher and philosophy — be one inside the other without either fusing into undifferentiated identi…

• Mythical Time

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the past that has never been present — a temporal register beyond the chronological-presentist horizon, anchored in the April 1960 V&I working note "Indestructible Past" ("architectonic past… mythical time, time be…

• Nachverstehen

  Husserl's term from "The Origin of Geometry" (HUA 371), taken up by Merleau-Ponty in his 1959–60 course as naming a mode of understanding that is fundamentally different from reactivation. Reactivation aims at total survey — "reactivating…

• Narcissism (Merleau-Ponty's Two Senses)

  Merleau-Ponty's late-ontology redefinition of "narcissism" — not Freudian libidinal cathexis to the ego, but a structural-ontological name for vision's reflexivity, which operates in two senses, both running through the dehiscence of the f…

• Nascent State (état naissant)

  Merleau-Ponty's recurring formulation in Phenomenology of Perception for the moment-just-before-objectification — the layer at which sense, perception, time, language, or freedom is being born without yet having been constituted as an obje…

• Natural Attitude and Theoretical Attitude

  In the Crisis an attitude (Einstellung) is "a habitually fixed style of willing life" (Vienna Lecture). The natural attitude is straightforward, world-directed living — "To live is always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world" (§37); the theor…

• Natural Symbolism

  Nature itself operates symbolically, and human symbols are a "second physis" that repeats natural symbolics rather than imposing external meaning. Knight argues that Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy, read through Schelling's Naturphilosophi…

• Naïve Linguistic Consciousness

  Merleau-Ponty's name (PbP 41, 221) for the natural attitude towards language: the immersion in one's native language that takes the language as transparent, modeled-upon being (calquée), and treats other languages as "tinted" or opaque. Th…

• Negative Reality of Love

  Merleau-Ponty's philosophical reading of Proust's Swann in Love and Albertine cycle: love is neither illusion nor positive possession but negative reality — a hollow instituted in the subject by the beloved, in which the impossibility of f…

• New Liberalism

  Merleau-Ponty's programmatic political stance, formulated in the Epilogue of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). A "sort of new liberalism" (AD 224) that (a) refuses the dictatorship of the proletariat, (b) accepts Communist action and rev…

• Nihilism

  Nihilism is one of the corpus's most-cited terms and was, until now, one of its few un-homed HUB motifs — because three ingested traditions use the word for structurally different things. For Nietzsche, nihilism is the will to nothingness:…

• No man's land (1949)

  Merleau-Ponty's political diagnosis of the 1947–49 bipolar conjuncture: the world has become a No man's land in which neither classical Marxism nor classical liberal capitalism applies. The USSR ≠ socialism (the proletariat is not the lead…

• Nomos and Phusis (Convention vs Nature)

  The great fifth-century antithesis between convention/law (nomos) and nature (phusis) — is justice a real feature of the world or a human contrivance? — staged across three Platonic dialogues, most radically by Callicles in the Gorgias. Ca…

• Non-Being (Plato's Sophist)

  The reconception of "that which is not" (to mē on) achieved in Plato's Sophist: not-being is the different (to heteron), not the contrary (enantion) of being. "Negation signifies otherness, not opposition" (257b–c) — so "the not-beautiful"…

• Non-Identity-Based Sense

  Inkpin's coinage for the mode of sense-realization in which particulars (works) matter as such and are balanced with — but not reduced to — generality (style). Coined as the structural counterpart to Husserlian identity-based sense, where…

• Nonphilosophy

  The organizing concept of Merleau-Ponty's 1959 course "The Possibility of Philosophy Today." Nonphilosophy designates not the absence or negation of philosophy but a dual condition: the destruction of classical philosophy (substance, subje…

• Nothingness as a Pseudo-Idea (Bergson)

  Bergson's sustained critique of the negative (Creative Evolution Chapters III–IV): the ideas of absolute Nothingness, of disorder, and of the unrealized possible are pseudo-ideas — they appear to have content but, examined, "destroy themse…

• Objective Thought

  Merleau-Ponty's cardinal methodological-and-ontological target in Phenomenology of Perception (1945): the stance that decomposes lived experience into determinate objects standing over against a constituting subject, then takes this produc…

• Objectivität (Objectivity, Hegel)

  Objectivität — objectivity — is the second moment of the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 127–172), positioned between Subjectivität (Begriff / Urtheil / Schluß) and die Idee. Objectivität is "the Concept fallen into objectivity" — and i…

• Onirisme (troisième ordre)

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the hybrid ontological register that is neither fully real nor fully imaginary — the "third order" in which perception and imagination intersect. Onirisme is the ontology-of-the-dreamwork that MP develops from 1949…

• Onto-Theo-Logik (Onto-Theo-Logic)

  The onto-theo-logical constitution (onto-theo-logische Verfassung) names the inner structural form of all metaphysics: because Being shows itself as Grund (ground), metaphysics is simultaneously Onto-logik (grounding beings in general as S…

• Ontogenesis of Time

  The local generation of time-orders out of melting time / change-dynamics. The phrase comes from a Merleau-Ponty unpublished working note (BNF vol. VIII Notes 1958-1959 p. [253]) and is developed by Morris (2024) into a structural-physical…

• Ontological Difference

  The distinction between Being (Sein, être) and beings (Seiende, étant), originating in Heidegger's philosophy and critically reworked by Merleau-Ponty. Being is not a supreme entity but "that which is not nothing" — the es gibt ("there is"…

• Ontological Diplopia

  A term Merleau-Ponty borrows from Maurice Blondel to name the structural co-presence of two ontological perspectives — a "positivist" one (being exists; nothingness has no properties; the world is positively real) and a "negativist" one (d…

• Ontologie de l'objet

  Merleau-Ponty's cardinal late-period polemical category — the ontologie de l'objet names any ontology that treats being on the model of the frontal observable object. The unifier behind Descartes, Kant, Sartre, and Piaget is not their disa…

• Operative Intentionality

  The pre-predicative, pre-reflective intentionality that "establishes the natural and pre-predicative unity of the world and of our life" (PhP, p. lxxxii). A Husserlian term (fungierende Intentionalität) that Merleau-Ponty makes the load-be…

• Organismal Institution

  Jan Halák's name for Merleau-Ponty's extension of the institution-concept to organic life — the thesis that life is institution: a "form-generating logic inherent to life itself" expressing "proto-historicity and proto-culturality." Not a…

• Paradox of Human Subjectivity

  The culminating difficulty of the Crisis's life-world way (§53): human subjectivity is at once a subject for the world (that for which the world is, and through whose accomplishments it has meaning) and an object in the world (one entity a…

• Parergon

  Derrida's figure for the structure that "disconcerts any opposition" between inside and outside of the work of art, developed in The Truth in Painting / La vérité en peinture (1978; trans. Bennington–McLeod 1987). The word — Greek παρέργον…

• Partage (Nancy)

  Nancy's untranslatable French term partage — simultaneously sharing out, apportioning, parting, partitioning, partaking — names the structure of "participation as much as irreducible partition" (Nancy, glossed by Derrida in On Touching—Jea…

• Passence

  Décarie-Daigneault's neologism (2024) for the modality of past-given-as-implicated in the present — the having-been-here of an entity disclosed by an encounter with its trace, given not as historical fact-of-presence but as a past that has…

• Passivity

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the constitutive non-coincidence of the subject with itself — "softness in the dough of consciousness," "a germ of sleep, disease, death present even within its acts." Theorized as the subject of MP's 1954–55 Collè…

• Pensée de Survol (Philosophy of Survey)

  The negative pole of Merleau-Ponty's late ontology: the failed philosophical posture of viewing the world from above (the "Sirius perspective," the "God-like survey," the position of the observateur absolu, the Kosmotheoros of Philosophie…

• Pente de l'histoire

  Merleau-Ponty's term — first explicitly named at his Brussels conference "L'individu et l'histoire" (14 March 1946); first published in compressed form in Sense and Non-Sense's "Battle over Existentialism" (Les Temps modernes No. 2, Novemb…

• Peras and Apeiron (Limit and the Unlimited)

  The signature ontological pairing of Plato's Philebus (23c–27c): a division of "everything that exists now in the universe" into four kinds — the unlimited (apeiron), limit (peras), their mixture (mikton), and the cause of the mixture (ait…

• Perceptual Cosmogony

  Being is perceptual "all the way down." Merleau-Ponty's thesis that nature is "the primordial, the non-constructed, the non-instituted," and that every account of the origin of being is necessarily thought in perceptual terms. "If there is…

• Perceptual Faith

  Merleau-Ponty's name for "what is before any position, animal and... faith" — the structural openness upon a world that any thinking presupposes. Not "faith" in the religious or doxastic sense (a decision to believe), but a "deep-seated se…

• Perceptual Unconscious

  Merleau-Ponty's reinterpretation of the Freudian unconscious as perceptual consciousness itself rather than as a second thinking subject hidden behind consciousness. Developed in MP's 1954–55 Passivity course as a retention-and-correction…

• Period vs. Epoch (Péguy distinction)

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947 working political-philosophical distinction (borrowed from Charles Péguy) between two modes of historical time. In a period, political man administers established law and one may hope for a history without violence. In…

• Personalism

  Mounier's synthesizing term for the mid-twentieth-century philosophical-political movement that affirms the person (la personne) — neither a thing nor a definition but "the one reality that we know, and that we are at the same time fashion…

• Personalization / Depersonalization

  Mounier's two-vector account of universal history in Personalism Ch I: history is constituted by the tension between personalization (the slow emergence of centres of indeterminacy out of matter's entropic monotony) and depersonalization (…

• Perspectivism

  Nietzsche's thesis that all knowing and valuing is perspectival, interpretive, and falsifying — there is no view from nowhere, no "facts" that are not already interpretations, and the value of truth is itself a perspectival valuation rathe…

• Phantasm

  In Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, the phantasm (phantasme) is "an obsessional image produced instinctively from the life of the impulses" (Translator's Preface §4) — an involuntary formation that arises from the comb…

• Phantom Limb

  Merleau-Ponty's central case in Part One of Phenomenology of Perception for the irreducibility of bodily being to either objective causality (physiology) or cogitation (psychology). The amputee experiences the missing limb as present — can…

• Pharmakon

  The word pharmakon — "remedy" and "poison," "drug," "charm" — under which Plato's Phaedrus stages its critique of writing, and which Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy" (in Dissemination) makes the lever for deconstructing the speech/writing hier…

• Phenomenal Field

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the properly transcendental field that is neither an objective domain (science) nor an inner world (introspection) — the layer of "living experience through which other people and things are first given to us, the…

• Phenomenal Invariants

  Taddio's central technical term in Art and Psychology (2025): the relationship between dependent and independent variables — the conditions experimental phenomenology has identified as prerequisites for the appearance of a given phenomenon…

• Phenomenon of Truth

  Frank Chouraqui's technical term for what survives the critique of truth: not any truth-content, but the compelling experience of reality as real that makes truth-claims meaningful at all. "Belief in X is a taking-X-to-be-true, and a takin…

• Philia (Friendship)

  Plato's inquiry into friendship/love (philia) in the Lysis — an aporetic dialogue that defines nothing yet deposits the conceptual materials two later theories will mine: Plato's own erotics in the Symposium and Aristotle's philia in the E…

• Philosopher of the Future

  Nietzsche's counter-figure to the scholar and the dogmatist: the value-creating legislator announced throughout Beyond Good and Evil (subtitled Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future). Where "philosophical laborers after the noble model of…

• Philosophical Archeology

  Leonard Lawlor's (Ch 2 of Thinking through French Philosophy) genealogical reconstruction of archeology as a properly philosophical concept — not a methodological-historical one — with a six-characteristic pre-history in Freud (Dora; Civil…

• Philosophical Praxis of Medicine

  Heinbokel's positive thesis (2021) for what medicine can become once its use of science is subjected to phenomenological analysis under the description "coherent deformation." Medicine, on this reading, is not a hybrid (a phenomenology and…

• Philosophy of Biology (Merleau-Ponty)

  MP's philosophy of biology develops continuously from La Structure du Comportement (1942) through the Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) and the Nature lectures (1956–60, published 2003). The corpus articulates a third position — neith…

• Philosophy of Reflection

  Merleau-Ponty's name (la philosophie réflexive) for the family of philosophical positions running from Descartes through Kant to Husserl that take reflection — the conversion of perception into thought of perceiving — as the founding philo…

• Philosophy-Cinema / Philosophy-Screens

  A program, not a theory. The phrase philosophy-cinema is Deleuze's: "Together we would like to be the Humpty-Dumpty of philosophy, or its Laurel and Hardy. A philosophy-cinema" (Note to the Italian Edition of The Logic of Sense, 1974). Car…

• Piety (To Hosion / The Holy)

  Piety (to hosion / to eusebes — the holy, the pious, godliness) is the virtue the Euthyphro tries and fails to define. Located as "a part of justice — the part concerned with the care of the gods" (12e–13a), it is run through five definiti…

• Play (Spiel)

  Play (Spiel) is Gadamer's "clue to ontological explanation" in Part One of Truth and Method: the concept through which he determines the mode of being of the work of art. Stripped of the subjective meaning it carries in Kant and Schiller (…

• Play as Political Virtue

  Chouraqui 2025's name for the existential-attitudinal form of Merleau-Ponty's ethics: the practical virtue corresponding to hermeneutic freedom. Play is not the absence of seriousness; it is the higher seriousness that takes responsibility…

• Poetic Inspiration (Enthousiasmos / the Magnet)

  Plato's account — sharpest in the Ion — of poetry as divine possession (enthousiasmos) rather than skill: the poet composes not "by mastering the subject, but by a divine gift" (theia moira), "out of his mind… his intellect is no longer in…

• Point of Diffraction

  Leonard Lawlor's central neologism (borrowed from Foucault AS 87/65 but recoded): the productive lack that generates a system of philosophical options when a generation of thinkers attempts to solve the same problem. For Lawlor the point o…

• Political Fable (faire savoir, as-if, quasi-concept)

  The wiki's concept page for the fable as Derrida deconstructs it in BS-I: not as a literary genre external to political reason but as the internal mode of operation of political discourse itself. Valéry's late aphorism — "IN THE BEGINNING…

• Politics (Merleau-Ponty)

  MP's political thought develops across Humanism and Terror (1947), the "Note on Machiavelli" (1949), Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), the inaugural lecture (1953), Signs (1960), and the late ontology of V&I and Eye and Mind (1959–61). T…

• Portance

  Saint Aubert's philosophical concept — effleurée but not thématisée in MP's late manuscripts — for the modality of being that bears and supports flesh while flesh surges from it. Announced as the subject of Saint Aubert's future post-exege…

• Positive Philosophy

  Schelling's late project (formally announced in the Berlin lectures of the 1840s, culminating in the 1850 Quelle) of going beyond what he calls Vernunftwissenschaft — merely rational science — by recognizing that thought is indebted to bei…

• Possibility of Philosophy

  The problem-space organizing Merleau-Ponty's late thought (1959–61): given the diagnosed condition of nonphilosophy — the destruction of classical philosophy combined with the emergence of genuine philosophical insight in art, literature,…

• Pre-objectivity

  The central concept of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the realm of experience prior to objective thought, which constitutes the deepest level of the subject's relation to the world. Pre-objectivity is not "blind" Kantian intu…

• Precession

  In Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy, precession names the pure principle of anteriority by which being always already precedes any constituting subject. The concept emerges from Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl's "Ur-Arche Earth Does Not…

• Pregnancy (Prägnanz)

  Borrowed from Gestalt psychology but radically redefined. For the Gestalt psychologists, Prägnanz names the tendency of perception toward "good forms" (symmetry, closure, regularity). For Merleau-Ponty, pregnancy means something ontologica…

• Prejudice (Vorurteil)

  Gadamer's rehabilitation of prejudice is the most counterintuitive move of Truth and Method. A prejudice (Vorurteil, praejudicium) is, etymologically, a fore-judgment — "a judgment that is rendered before all the elements that determine a…

• Primacy of Perception

  Merleau-Ponty's signature doctrine and the name of his 1946 address to the Société française de philosophie, the most compressed in-print statement of the Phenomenology of Perception's thesis. The "primacy" is neither a reduction of knowle…

• Primordial Expression

  Every human use of the body is already expression. This thesis, stated most explicitly in The Prose of the World, grounds Merleau-Ponty's entire theory of creative expression — painting, literature, speech, philosophy — in the body's capac…

• Primordial Symbolism

  Merleau-Ponty's term (symbolisme primordial) for the dream's non-coded, pre-predicative, positive symbolic operation — the mode of meaning-formation MP keeps from Freud after refusing Freud's own metapsychology of disguise. The term names…

• Principal Condition (Economic Determinism, MP's Reading)

  Merleau-Ponty's exact formula for the relation between economy and history in his sympathetic-from-the-inside reading of Marx: economic conditions are the principal condition of historical progress, but principal-condition is not cause-of-…

• Priority of Soul (the Laws X Argument for the Gods)

  In Book X of the Laws, Plato gives the corpus's fullest natural theology: the proof that the gods exist, grounded in the priority of soul over body. Soul is defined as self-moving motion — "the motion capable of moving itself" (896a), the…

• Processioning (paysage)

  David Morris's neologism for the temporal-distributive structure of quantum-mechanical dynamics, replacing the wavefunction-realist image of "guiding-branching" as a process spatially distributed alongside the apparatus. In English, a "pro…

• Propaedeutic Dialectic

  The staged dialectical entry that Merleau-Ponty uses to introduce a phenomenological investigation into a subject area. The form: naïve attitude → first ill-judged universalism → objectifying scientific stage (yielding a "truth of objectiv…

• Prospective Activity of Consciousness

  Merleau-Ponty's term in Phenomenology of Perception (p. 241; see also p. 246) for the unique primary phenomenon at the foundation of his philosophy: the irreducible movement of consciousness toward the world, projecting a future and instit…

• Protreptic (Exhortation to Virtue)

  Protreptic (προτρεπτικὸς λόγος, "the speech that turns toward") is the hortatory speech-act that converts a hearer to the pursuit of philosophy, virtue, and the care of the soul — distinct from, and in the dialogues typically prior to, the…

• Punishment as Cure (Curative Penology)

  Across the Gorgias and Laws IX, Plato holds that punishment (kolasis) aims at cure, reform, and deterrence — never retribution. Since injustice is a disease of the soul and "no one does wrong willingly," the legislator is a doctor of souls…

• Quantität (Hegel)

  Quantität (also Größe) is the second Abschnitt of the Doctrine of Being (GW 21 raw 2843–4659), positioned between Fürsichseyn (the close of Qualität) and Maß (the categorial unity of Qualität and Quantität). Hegel's signature claim: Quanti…

• Quasi-Natural Signification

  Merleau-Ponty's phrase at The Problem of Speech (PbP) p. 199, revisited in the third Nature course of 1959–60: an "order of quasi-natural significations" of language — the breakdown of the strict bifurcation between the natural sign (whose…

• Realism as a Well-Founded Error

  Merleau-Ponty's canonical formulation in The Structure of Behavior §"Truth of Naturalism" (raw 1984): realism is an error qua dogmatic thesis but a motivated one — "it rests on an authentic phenomenon which philosophy has the function of m…

• Realist Thought

  Merleau-Ponty's distinctive methodological diagnostic from chapter 7 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy (1951–52). Realist thought is the cardinal methodological error of classical psychology: it "cuts up and separates as well as distinguish…

• Recognition and Institution

  Chouraqui 2025's name for the structural form of agency in Merleau-Ponty's mature ethics: action is the simultaneous unity of recognition (taking the object as a standard, responding to what is) and institution (actively assigning meaning,…

• Redoubled Negation

  Merleau-Ponty's term for a negation that is inside being rather than opposed to it — "a more profound or re-doubled negation" (V&I 53–54). It names the negative that is concretely configured into the structure of sensation and significatio…

• Reflexion (Hegel)

  Hegel's Reflexion — the engine of the entire Doctrine of Essence — is not a subjective comparison-and-generalization activity (Kantian reflection) nor introspection (Cartesian-Lockean). It is an ontological structure of Wesen itself: "abso…

• Reflexionsbestimmungen (Reflection-Determinations)

  The four Reflexionsbestimmungen of difference — Identität, Verschiedenheit, Gegensatz, Widerspruch — form a single graded sequence in which difference deepens until it becomes contradiction, and contradiction dissolves into Grund. Located…

• Reprise

  The act by which a subject takes up again a past — neither repeating it nor leaving it behind — and so makes a future. Merleau-Ponty's signature concept across 1946–1955: the operative form of his philosophy of history, the structural rela…

• Ressentiment

  Nietzsche's name (kept in French, untranslated, throughout On the Genealogy of Morality) for the creative, value-positing reaction of the impotent — the psychological engine of the slave revolt in morality. Its definition is the hinge of t…

• Retrograde Movement of the True

  Merleau-Ponty's term (borrowed from Bergson and radicalized) for the structure in which a new truth, once established, appears retrospectively to have been already present before its discovery — though it was not. "There is truly a retrogr…

• Reversibility

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the structural form of the chiasm — the reciprocal turning of seeing-seen, touching-touched, speaking-listening — and what he calls "the ultimate truth" of his late ontology (closing line of V&I Ch 4, p. 155). Cruc…

• Revolution as Another Stiftung

  The structural-parallel thesis — anchored in Merleau-Ponty's cardinal formulation at Institution and Passivity p. 13, "the very general sense of institution is not the opposite of revolution; revolution is another Stiftung" — that revoluti…

• Revolutions are True as Movements and False as Regimes

  The slogan-formula of the Epilogue of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). Merleau-Ponty's settled diagnosis of the revolutionary dialectic: revolutions enact a truth in their movement — the passage in which a fallen class no longer rules a…

• Rhetoric (Plato's Two Faces)

  Plato gives rhetoric two opposed treatments that must be held together. In the Gorgias it is condemned as a knack of flattery (empeiria/kolakeia) — not a craft (technē) at all, because it "has no account (logos) of the nature… is able to s…

• Robinson Crusoe (figure)

  Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its sequel Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) — read by Derrida (BS-II) as the first of two "isolated islands" of the seminar (the second bei…

• Rule of Law (Plato's Laws)

  In the Laws, the rule of law is the political form available for the human (post-Cronus) condition — when no godlike knower is, in fact, ever in power. Nomos becomes "the dispensation of reason," the "edicts of reason" dignified with the n…

• Saturated Attention

  "Saturated attention" is Frank Chouraqui's coinage for the perceptual-political mechanism by which legitimate political order operates: the active management of the perceptual / attention field so that the question of truth-grounding never…

• Saussurean Diacriticality

  The thesis Merleau-Ponty draws from Saussure — that signs are "negative, diacritical, conventional" and that "in operating on each other they constitute a structure that is homologous to that of the signified" — used at the 1953 Collège co…

• Schein (Semblance / Show, Hegel)

  Schein — semblance, show, illusion — is the second category of the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 4344–4378), positioned between Wesen-as-such and Reflexion. Hegel's cardinal thesis: "Der Schein ist das eigene Setzen des Wesens" (raw 4308…

• Schematisieren eines Chaos

  Nietzsche's account of knowledge, as read by Heidegger in Der Wille zur Macht als Erkenntnis (1939, heidegger-1961-nietzsche-i Part III): knowing is the schematizing of a chaos according to practical need. Knowledge is not correspondence t…

• Schlechte vs. wahre Unendlichkeit (Bad vs. True Infinity)

  Hegel's distinction between the schlechte (bad / spurious) and wahre (true / affirmative) infinity is the signature thesis of the Unendlichkeit-chapter of the Doctrine of Being (GW 21 raw ~2270–2438). The locus classicus: "die Hauptsache i…

• Schluß (Syllogism, Hegel)

  Der Schluß — the syllogism — is the third moment of Subjectivität in the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 90–125). Hegel's cardinal thesis: the syllogism is "the truth of judgment" — and in its developed form, "everything rational is a s…

• Schmerz als Vorrecht des Lebendigen (Pain as Privilege of the Living, Hegel)

  Schmerz als Vorrecht des Lebendigen — pain as privilege of the living — is Hegel's cardinal formulation in the Life chapter of the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 p. 194). The full sentence: "Der Schmerz ist daher das Vorrecht lebendiger Na…

• Schritt zurück (the step back)

  Heidegger's name for the cardinal Bewegtheit-figure of the late-Heidegger Denken. Locus classicus: Protokoll zu einem Seminar über »Zeit und Sein« (1962) p. 38: "Der Schritt zurück tritt vor dem zurück, gewinnt Abstand zu dem, was erst ank…

• Science as Coherent Deformation

  The application of Merleau-Ponty's coherent-deformation to the scientific gaze itself — and to scientific writings such as neuropsychological case reports — as a styled deformation of the world that opens a new field of investigations with…

• Science Secrète

  Merleau-Ponty's phrase from L'Œil et l'esprit (1961), placed at the structural pivot between §1's polemic against operational thinking and §2's phenomenology of the painter's body: "What, then, is this secret science which he has or which…

• Se toucher toi (To Self-Touch You)

  Nancy's grammatical-philosophical figure (from Corpus p. 36) for the constitutive failure of pure self-touch — and one of Derrida's master-concepts in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Part III, §§12–13). The French phrase se toucher toi — "to s…

• Sedimentation

  Husserl's term, taken over and reinterpreted by Merleau-Ponty: the process by which an initially creative expressive act becomes a stable "acquired" meaning available to further expression. Sedimentation is the structural condition of all…

• Sein zum Tode (Being-toward-Death)

  Heidegger's name for Dasein's existential-ontological relation to its own end — not a future event but a structural possibility that pervades Dasein's being as long as it exists. "Der Tod als Ende des Daseins ist die eigenste, unbezügliche…

• Sein, Nichts, Werden (Being, Nothing, Becoming)

  The opening triad of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik — pure Sein (Being), pure Nichts (Nothing), and Werden (Becoming) as their truth. Pure Being and pure Nothing are the same: equally featureless, equally indeterminate, equally empty. Thei…

• Seinsfrage

  Heidegger's "question of Being" — the cardinal question of Sein und Zeit and the rubric under which Heidegger's lifelong project travels. The 1964 essay "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" marginal (27) reframes the Seinsfrage…

• Seinsgeschichte

  Heidegger's concept of the "history of Being" — not a chronicle of philosophical doctrines but the successive ways in which Being itself "sends" (schickt) itself, concealing itself in the very act of disclosure. As read by Merleau-Ponty, t…

• Self-Differentiation

  Frank Chouraqui's unifying term for the structure shared by Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty: the ability of reality to present itself as different from what it is, thereby — paradoxically — revealing its structure as self-differentiation. For…

• Self-Falsification (Being as)

  The ontological thesis of Chouraqui 2014: Being is not an entity that falsifies itself; Being is self-falsification. That is, Being is the movement by which pre-objective experience transforms itself into metaphysical error — by which the…

• Self-Knowledge and Care of the Self

  The Delphic command "know thyself" (gnōthi seauton) and its practical correlate "care for / cultivate oneself" (epimeleia heautou) form a single Socratic-Platonic imperative whose burden is to ask what the self is before it can be known or…

• Semiotic of Impulses

  The semiotic of impulses is the organizing concept of Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (its longest chapter is titled "The Valetudinary States at the Origin of a Semiotic of Impulses"). The impulses (impulsions) are "in…

• Sense vs. Respect

  Merleau-Ponty's distinction between sens du réel (sense of the real) and respect du réel (respect for the real), drawn from "On Indochina" in Signs (p. 520). Chouraqui 2025 §3.1 foregrounds the contrast as the perceptual face of hermeneuti…

• Sensible Ideas

  Merleau-Ponty's reversal of Plato: ideas that are inseparable from the sensible appearances in which they are given, appearing not in an "intelligible sun" but as the "lining and depth" of the visible. The concept originates in the Phenome…

• Setzen / Voraussetzen (Positing / Presupposing, Hegel)

  The paired terms Setzen (positing) and Voraussetzen (presupposing) are the engine of Reflexion in the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 4400–4516). Hegel's cardinal claim: "die setzende Reflexion ist von Anfang an auch voraussetzend" — the po…

• Shadow Philosophy

  The hermeneutic and critical method by which a thinker is read through the unthought philosophy within his thought — not the explicit doctrine the thinker states, but the other philosophy implied by his statements that he himself did not t…

• Silence

  Silence in Merleau-Ponty is not absence of language but its structural ground — the horizon from which speech emerges, the tacit dimension that makes the said possible. Across the corpus, silence names a family of registers (perceptual, pa…

• Simulacrum

  In Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, the simulacrum (simulacre; Ger. Trugbild) is the willed reproduction of a phantasm — "the actualization of something in itself incommunicable and nonrepresentable: the phantasm in it…

• Singular-Plural (Nancy)

  Nancy's lifelong concept, named in his 1996 book Être singulier pluriel (Being Singular Plural) and re-deployed in late synthesis in Fragile Skin of the World VIII: the structural co-implication of singular and plural at the ontological le…

• Sittlichkeit

  Hegel's term — Pinkard renders as "ethical life" — for the lived, substantial ethical substance of a people (a polis, a tradition) as distinct from Moralität (Kantian individual morality). Sittlichkeit is the immediate form of Spirit (Chap…

• Socratic Definition (the 'What Is X?' Question)

  The demand, made canonical in the Euthyphro, for a definition by essence: not examples of X but "that form itself (eidos) by which all X-things are X," a single account usable "as a model" (paradeigma) to sort any case (6d–e). This ti esti…

• Socratic Ignorance (Human Wisdom)

  Socratic ignorance is the second-order knowledge of one's own non-knowledge — the "human wisdom" (anthrōpinē sophia) the Apology makes Socrates' signature: the wisest person is the one who, "like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is wo…

• Socratic Intellectualism (Virtue Is Knowledge)

  The thesis, sharpest in the Protagoras, that virtue is knowledge — and its two corollaries: the unity of the virtues (courage, justice, temperance, piety, wisdom are one knowledge, not separable dispositions) and the denial of akrasia ("no…

• Soil / Ground / Sol

  MP's late register of sol / Boden / ground names the carnal-geological structural a priori of the late ontology — a non-categorial, non-ideal ground-as-sense that MP develops out of his reading of Husserl's Umsturz-fragment (Husserl's 1934…

• Sorge (Care)

  Heidegger's name for the Strukturganzes (structural totality) of Dasein: the unified threefold structure of Sich-vorweg-schon-sein-in-(einer Welt-) als Sein-bei (innerweltlich begegnendem Seienden) — "being-ahead-of-itself-being-already-in…

• Soul as Subject-Multiplicity

  Nietzsche's constructive critique of the subject in Beyond Good and Evil: the "I" of "I think" is a grammatical fiction, but the right response is not to abolish the soul — it is to re-engineer it as a plurality. §12 is decisive: the Chris…

• Sovereignty

  The wiki's master concept page for sovereignty as deconstructed by Derrida in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I (2001–2002) and Volume II (2002–2003), and as adjacently critiqued by Chouraqui (2021) ch. 9 from the MP-side. Sovereignty…

• Speaking Speech and Spoken Speech

  Merleau-Ponty's distinction in Part One Ch VI of Phenomenology of Perception between parole parlante (speaking speech, the act of creative expression) and parole parlée (spoken speech, the sedimented cultural world of available significati…

• Specular Image

  The child's image of his or her own body in the mirror, taken by Merleau-Ponty in the 1950–51 Sorbonne lectures as the site where self-awareness, alienation, and the symbolic function converge. MP's treatment (Ch 4 §3 of Primacy of Percept…

• Speculative Good Friday

  Hegel's name (from Glauben und Wissen, 1802; recapitulated in the Phenomenology Religion chapter at §§779–785) for the dialectical-speculative meaning of Christ's death: the death of the divine mediator is simultaneously the death of the a…

• Spontaneity vs Liberty

  Sartre's 1961 formulation of the cardinal philosophical-genealogical pair distinguishing his own and Merleau-Ponty's mature thought from a common 1934 starting point. Both philosophers received Husserl's intentionality in the same year (19…

• Spontaneous Structuration

  Merleau-Ponty's name in the 1949–52 Sorbonne lectures for the body's positive-organisational power — neither innate idea, nor intellectual schema imposed on data, nor classical-physics composition of forces, but immanent self-organization…

• Statesmanship (Politikē Technē)

  The royal or political art (politikē / basilikē technē) defined in Plato's Statesman: an expert knowledge of how to rule a city justly. The dialogue's distinctive thesis is that statecraft is architectonic and directive — it "does not itse…

• Stiftung

  Husserl's word — "foundation," "establishment," "institution" — for the operation by which a singular event (the Urstiftung) opens a temporal dimension along which subsequent experiences acquire meaning, are handed down (the Nachstiftung)…

• Stone

  The stone is a corpus-motif on which the post-Heideggerian speculative-realism debate converges. In Morin 2022's reading (Ch 5–6), the stone is the contested figure across at least nine thinker-positions (Sartre, MP, Cohen, Nancy, Heidegge…

• Strong Beauty

  Strong beauty is an event, not a quality — a radically unanticipable apparitional moment characterized by opacity, imprevisibility, and an intensity akin to pain. The concept, developed by Galen A. Johnson and Veronique Foti drawing on Mer…

• Sublime Point

  A figure Merleau-Ponty borrows from Breton and deploys recurrently in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) for the dreamed-of moment in which "matter and spirit would no longer be discernible as subject and object, individual and history, pa…

• Substanz (Substance, Hegel)

  Substanz — substance — is the first moment of the Dritter Abschnitt (Wirklichkeit) of the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 6181–6206, with the cardinal Spinoza-Anmerkung at raw 5951–5989). Substance is Spinoza's principle taken with utmost s…

• Surrection

  A metaphorical figure developed in Merleau-Ponty's late work and analyzed extensively by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (Poetic of the World, Ch 2). Surrection names the vertical emergence through which desire's insurrections and resurrections d…

• Survivance / sur-vivance

  Derrida's late concept of trace, developed most explicitly in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II (2002–2003), session 5 (pp. 193–195): "a survivance whose 'sur-' is without superiority, without height, altitude or highness, and thus wi…

• Symbolic Matrix

  Merleau-Ponty's term for the structured existential field that a past event leaves behind in the subject, organizing subsequent perceptions without being a "content" of consciousness. "The unconscious is the symbolic matrix left behind by…

• Syncope (Nancy)

  Nancy's figure (developed across Le discours de la syncope: Logodaedalus (1976), Ego sum (1979), Corpus (1992), Une pensée finie (1990)) for the interruption-at-the-heart-of-contact — the rhythmic break, the cut, the gap, the diastolic/sys…

• Syncretic Sociability

  The pre-individual intercorporeal field that precedes and grounds personal existence. In Merleau-Ponty's 1950–51 Sorbonne course (The Child's Relations with Others, Ch 4 of Primacy of Perception) and the Institution course (1954–55), syncr…

• Système d'Équivalences

  Merleau-Ponty's phrase from L'Œil et l'esprit (1961) for the structural relation that holds between a painting and the world it brings to expression. The painting is "a system of equivalences" — its forms, colors, lines, and depths are not…

• Tacit Cogito

  Merleau-Ponty's name in Phenomenology of Perception for the pre-linguistic self-presence of consciousness that underlies the explicit Cartesian Cogito. Introduced in Part Three Ch I.o–p as the ground of the "spoken cogito" (the cogito one…

• Task of Thinking (Aufgabe des Denkens)

  Heidegger's late name for post-philosophical thinking — a thinking that is neither metaphysics nor science, preparatory not founding (vorbereitend nicht stiftend), abseits ohne Effekt (apart, without effect), gleichwohl von eigener Notwend…

• Techject / Ecotechnics (Nancy)

  Nancy's late philosophy-of-technology operates with two distinct-but-coordinated terms: techject (II §3 e raw 559) — neither object nor subject, the agent of intrinsically-technical relations — and ecotechnics (II §3 d raw 549) — the regim…

• Technē of Bodies

  Nancy's phrase (from Corpus and L'intrus, both 2000) for the technical-prosthetic-supplementary structure of any body — the technē (Greek technē: art, craft, skill, technics) that constitutes the body rather than supervening upon it. The p…

• Teleological-Historical Reflection

  The distinctive method of the Crisis, announced in the 1936 Preface: "by way of a teleological-historical reflection upon the origins of our critical scientific and philosophical situation, to establish the unavoidable necessity of a trans…

• Teleology (Hegel)

  Teleologie is the third and culminating sub-moment of Objectivität in the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 154–172). For Hegel, teleology is not a regulative maxim of reflective judgment (Kant's restriction in the Critique of Judgment) a…

• Temperance (Sōphrosynē)

  Sōphrosynē — self-command, a developed consciousness of oneself and one's due place — is the virtue the Charmides tries and fails to define. The editor stresses it "has no adequate translation": not abstemiousness but dignity, self-restrai…

• Texture imaginaire du réel

  Merleau-Ponty's cardinal formula for the ontological structure that the real itself is through and through woven with imaginary dimensions. Coined in L'Œil et l'Esprit (OE p. 24, 1961), the formula is the chapter-title and organizing thesi…

• The Absolute as Moral Catastrophe

  Merleau-Ponty's diagnostic that the philosopher's claim to Absolute Knowledge is not merely an epistemological error but a moral catastrophe whose political form is purges. Developed in Sense and Non-Sense's "The Metaphysical in Man" (Chap…

• The Agent (suppôt)

  The agent is Daniel W. Smith's rendering of Klossowski's suppôt — a term retrieved from scholastic philosophy (Latin suppositum, "that which is placed under," linked to substantia and subjectum) and applied to a Nietzschean problem. In Nie…

• The Allegory of the Cave

  The third and most famous of the Republic's images of the Good (514a–521b): prisoners chained since childhood face a wall on which shadows of carried artifacts are cast by a fire behind them; they take "the shadows of those artifacts" for…

• The Antithetic Critique of Sartre

  Merleau-Ponty's diagnostic that Sartre's L'Être et le néant (1943) "remains too exclusively antithetic" — that Sartre presents the for-itself / in-itself and the for-myself / for-others relations as alternatives rather than as "the living…

• The Ascetic Ideal

  The subject of the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, and Nietzsche's name for the value-system that treats this life — "nature, world, the whole sphere of becoming and of transitoriness" — as a wrong path to be denied in favor o…

• The Ascetic Priest

  The central figure of the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality — the incarnate agent of the ascetic-ideal, "the foreordained savior, shepherd and advocate of the sick herd" (GM III.15). His defining function is given in a single for…

• The Daimonion (Socrates' Divine Sign)

  The daimonion (τὸ δαιμόνιον, "the divine/spiritual thing"; also daimonion sēmeion, "the divine sign") is the private, recurring inner voice or sign that Socrates reports having had "from childhood." In the genuine dialogues it has one cons…

• The Divided Line

  The second of the Republic's three images of the Good (509d–511e): a line cut into two unequal parts (visible / intelligible), each cut again "in the same ratio," yielding four segments that track degrees of truth and being matched to four…

• The Fine (to kalon)

  To kalon is the broad Greek term of favorable evaluation — covering our beautiful, noble, admirable, fine, and excellent, with the aesthetic and the moral fused. The Hippias Major mounts an aporetic search for "the fine itself" (to kalon a…

• The Form of the Good

  The capstone of Plato's metaphysics in the Republic (504a–509c): the Form of the Good (to agathon) is "the most important thing to learn" (megiston mathēma, 505a), the source of both the being and the intelligibility of the Forms — and yet…

• The Hand of God

  The theologized organ that, on Derrida's reading in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (esp. §§7, 11), haunts the haptocentric tradition of touch. The figure runs from the biblical hand of God (Genesis, Exodus, the Psalms) through Aquinas's mutuus…

• The Human Object

  Merleau-Ponty's term, attributed to Marx, for the cultural object as carrier of social meaning at the level of perception. The notion is given its concentrated statement in "Marxism and Philosophy" (Chapter 9 of Sense and Non-Sense, Revue…

• The Ideal Genesis of Matter (détente / inversion)

  The metaphysical core of Creative Evolution Chapter III: Bergson's account of how intellectuality and materiality are engendered together from a higher "Consciousness in general," such that matter is the inversion-by-interruption of spirit…

• The Mask

  In Beyond Good and Evil the mask is both a recurrent theme and the book's own method. "All that is profound loves a mask" (§40); "Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, a mask is continuously growing around every profound spirit th…

• The Mean (To Metrion / Due Measure)

  Plato's doctrine — sharpest in the Statesman (283c–285c) — that there are two arts of measurement: (a) measuring relative magnitude (greater and less, things measured against each other), and (b) measuring against the mean or due measure (…

• The Metaphysical in Man

  Merleau-Ponty's positive definition of metaphysics, developed primarily in the 1947 essay "The Metaphysical in Man" (Chapter 7 of Sense and Non-Sense, originally Revue de métaphysique et de morale July 1947). Metaphysics, for MP, is not me…

• The Metaphysical Novel

  Merleau-Ponty's coinage for the literary form proper to phenomenological-existential ontology. A novel is metaphysical not by stating philosophical theses but by making them exist for us in the way that things exist. The form is named in S…

• The Play-Element (Huizinga)

  Johan Huizinga's concept (from Homo Ludens, 1938), as deployed by Chouraqui in "Europe as the Crisis of Play" (2025): play is the primary, unitary "mental continuum" out of which civilization gradually carves the separated modes of playful…

• The Schneider Case

  The clinical case of Johann Schneider — a German soldier who sustained a brain injury from shrapnel in 1915 — that Merleau-Ponty uses as the methodological engine of Part One of Phenomenology of Perception. Schneider was studied from 1918…

• The Sovereign Individual

  The figure introduced at GM II.2 as the "ripest fruit" of the long prehistoric labor of the "morality of custom": "the sovereign individual, like only unto himself, the autonomous, supermoral individual who has liberated himself from the m…

• The Third-Year Crisis

  Merleau-Ponty's developmental account, in chapter 5 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy (1950–51), of the moment when the spectator-spectacle pair (formed in 6m–3yr syncretic-sociability) internalizes and the child becomes capable of represen…

• The Tragedy of Love (Simmel)

  Simmel's philosophical articulation of love's tragic structure: love is tragic not because external fate destroys it, not because lovers collide with ethical substances, not because of any hamartia — but because love grows out of the life-…

• The Tripartite Soul

  Plato's division of the soul into three parts — the rational (logistikon), the spirited (thumoeides), and the appetitive (epithumētikon) — argued in Republic IV (435a–441c) and used to define justice as psychic order. Its engine is the pri…

• The Two Hegels (1807 vs. 1827)

  Merleau-Ponty's structural distinction between the Hegel of 1807 (the Phänomenologie des Geistes) and the Hegel of 1827 (the Encyclopädie + Philosophy of Right). Developed in the 1946 essay "Hegel's Existentialism" (Chapter 5 of Sense and…

• The Unthought

  Merleau-Ponty's meta-principle for reading the philosophical tradition, taken over from Heidegger's Der Satz vom Grund and applied in "The Philosopher and His Shadow" (1959). The "unthought-of element" (das Ungedachte) in a work is not wha…

• The Vicious Circle as a Selective Doctrine

  The longest and most politically charged chapter of Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle reads the Eternal Return not only as a lived experience but as a selective doctrine — "a means of training and selection" (Nietzsche's…

• The Visible and the Invisible

  The structural pair that gives The Visible and the Invisible its title and its central ontological problem. The invisible is not the merely-not-yet-seen (a hidden visible) and not the absolutely-other-than-visible (a Platonic transcendent)…

• The Will to Truth

  Nietzsche's name for the unconditional drive to truth "at any price" — and, in the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, the unexpected core of the very ascetic-ideal that modern science and atheism imagine themselves to oppose. Bey…

• Theodicy

  The philosophical project of justifying God's permission of evil in creation — coined by Leibniz in his 1710 Essais de théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal. The Love & Schmidt editors' Introduction to t…

• Theory of Forms

  Plato's thesis that the truly real beings are Forms (eidē) — self-identical, invisible, unchanging realities such as "the Equal itself," "the Beautiful itself," "the Just itself" — of which sensible particulars are deficient, transient cop…

• Third Domain

  Merleau-Ponty's name (chiefly in the Possibility of Philosophy Course 2, line 2578 cardinal formulation) for the structural register that is neither subject nor object, neither presence nor absence, neither being nor nothing — what Saint A…

• Third Man Argument

  The most famous objection to the Theory of Forms, pressed by the aged Parmenides against young Socrates in Plato's Parmenides (132a–133a): positing one Form over many instances generates an unlimited regress of Forms. If many large things…

• Three Orders of Signification

  Merleau-Ponty's ontological-pivot thesis in The Structure of Behavior Ch III: matter, life, and mind are not powers of being but three orders of signification, distinguished by the type of equilibrium each achieves and the kind of integrat…

• Théologie explicative

  Saint Aubert's technical term — first in his 2008 Archives de philosophie article, then systematized in Être et chair II Ch VII § 3d — for the Leibnizian-Thomist theological position Merleau-Ponty targets across his late manuscripts. The t…

• Time-to-Come / À-venir (Nancy)

  Nancy's name for the temporal mode of the time-to-come, distinct from future-as-calculable-projection. From Fragile Skin I §1: "The to-come (to write it in this way) . . . would be the pre-sence of the present, that which does not yet take…

• Tonality of the Soul

  The tonality of the soul (tonalité de l'âme) is Pierre Klossowski's term — retained by Daniel W. Smith as "tonality" because the usage "is as unusual in French as it is in English" (Translator's Preface §3) — for the fluctuating intensitie…

• Topology (Merleau-Ponty)

  MP's topologie de la chair / topologie de l'être names the spatial-relational structure of late-MP being and flesh, articulated in roughly 80 attestations between October 1959 and September 1960 (working notes, Être et Monde feuillets, L'Œ…

• Touching the Untouchable

  The structural figure — running from Aristotle's De Anima 424a (haptou kai anaptou: "touch has for its object both what is tangible and what is intangible") through the entire philosophical tradition of touch — that the object of touch is…

• Tradition (Gadamer)

  For Gadamer, tradition (Überlieferung) is not the inert, given antithesis of reason but a living mode of preservation (Bewahrung) that is itself "an act of reason, though an inconspicuous one." We do not stand outside tradition and choose…

• Tragic Optimism

  Mounier's signature coinage at Personalism Ch I p. 16: "Between the impatient optimism of liberal and revolutionary illusion, and the impatient pessimism of the fascists, the right road for man is in this tragic optimism, where he finds hi…

• Transcendental Apperception (Kant / Hegel)

  The transcendental unity of apperception — Kant's "I think" that must be able to accompany all my representations (Critique of Pure Reason B132) — is, for Kant, the highest principle of the understanding's a-priori synthesis of intuitions.…

• Transcendental Geology

  Giovanni Fava's elevation of a single late working-note phrase from Merleau-Ponty into the central interpretive paradigm of late MP's philosophy of nature: a philosophy capable of linking history to its ontological belonging to the Earth,…

• Transitivism

  Wallon's term, adopted by Merleau-Ponty in the 1950–51 Sorbonne lectures, for the child's (and, residually, the adult's) attribution to others of what belongs to oneself — or vice versa. The classic example: a child slaps her companion, th…

• Transtemporality

  Merleau-Ponty's late concept (occasional in the 1954–55 Institution and Passivity lectures) for the coherent coexistence of multiple heterogeneous temporalities on a single plane. MP defines it formulaically as "institution in its nascent…

• Trotsky's Horse

  A recurring image in Merleau-Ponty's writings on politics, drawn from Leon Trotsky and quoted at least four times in MP's Inédits 1946–1949 (Mimesis 2022; see Chouraqui 2025 §2.2 and footnotes 8–10): "one learns to ride a horse by mounting…

• True Humanism (Merleau-Ponty)

  MP's "true humanism" / "humanisme réel" / "vrai humanisme" names a humanism without an a priori human substratum: humanity cannot be conceived prior to the practices of communication and communion. The locus classicus is the "Note on Machi…

• Truth is Poetry (le vrai est poésie)

  Merleau-Ponty's organizing thesis for the fourteenth lecture of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953): "The truth is in essence poetic, [it] is found only in fiction, – which is not unreal or arbitrary" (L11 [118]). With…

• Truth of Objectivism

  Merleau-Ponty's phrase at The Problem of Speech (PbP) p. 57: the truth that the objectifying scientific stage of the propaedeutic dialectic yields, which the integrative recovery must preserve rather than discard. The structurally analogou…

• Two Historicities

  Merleau-Ponty's distinction (in Signs, "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence") between two modes of historicity: (1) the cumulative historicity of advent, in which works communicate across time by the reactivation of their expressiv…

• Two Ways of Being Young

  Merleau-Ponty's typology of philosophical disposition, articulated in the addendum to the Preface of Signs (1960, pp. 34–35) and used by Sartre in his 1961 manuscript-draft eulogy (sartre-1984-merleau-ponty-vivant) as the structural heuris…

• Ultra-chose

  MP's ontological-phenomenological term for the modality of every perceived thing: irrécusable et inaccessible, given in flesh yet always held at a lointain. Borrowed from Wallon's 1945 developmental psychology (against Piaget's ideal of th…

• Ultra-things and Infra-things (Wallon)

  Henri Wallon's term, adopted by Merleau-Ponty in chapters 3 and 7 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy: cosmological horizons toward which no objective attitude is available, but which the subject does not doubt. Earth, sky, parents-of-parents…

• Ultrabolshevism

  Merleau-Ponty's coinage, in Chapter 5 of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), for Sartre's position in Les Communistes et la paix (1952–54). Ultrabolshevism is Bolshevism without the dialectic: it keeps every Bolshevik demand (pure action,…

• Umdrehung des Platonismus

  Nietzsche's self-described project, recorded already in 1870/71: "Meine Philosophie umgedrehter Platonismus: je weiter ab vom wahrhaft Seienden, um so reiner schöner besser ist es. Das Leben im Schein als Ziel" (IX, 190). Heidegger reads t…

• Unendliches Urtheil (Infinite Judgment, Hegel)

  The unendliches Urtheil — infinite judgment — is a sub-doctrine of the Urtheil des Daseyns in the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 76–77). The infinite judgment is a judgment in which subject and predicate share no common sphere: "the sp…

• Ungrund (Schelling / Boehme)

  The non-ground — Schelling's most distinctive move in the closing "All-Unity of Love" of the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809). The Ungrund is "the absolute considered merely in itself" prior to the dual…

• Unhappy Consciousness

  Das unglückliche Bewusstsein — Hegel's name for the split self that emerges at the end of the Self-Consciousness chapter (§§206–230). After mastery, Stoicism, and Skepticism have all failed to actualize self-consciousness's freedom, consci…

• Universal Philanthropy

  Simmel's articulation of a distinct trans-vital love-form: love directed at "everything that bears a human face" (Oakes p. 211), abstracted from individuality, kindred to but structurally distinct from both cosmic eros (pantheism of love)…

• Unvordenklich / Unvordenklichkeit

  Schelling's late term for being that "pre-dates thought, possibility, and the PSR" — being which cannot be thought away because thought itself arrives in possibility, and possibility presupposes this being. In Gardner's reconstruction, unv…

• Ur-Theilung (Original Parting, Hegel)

  Ur-Theilung (or Ur-Teilung) is Hegel's etymological-philosophical move on the German Urtheil (judgment) in the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 60–66). The compound Ur-theilen reads Urtheil as the original (Ur) parting (Theilung) — judgm…

• Urtheil (Judgment, Hegel)

  Urtheil — judgment — is the second moment of Subjectivität in the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 53–89). Hegel's cardinal thesis: judgment is not the connection of two pre-existing concepts but the original Theilung — the Ur-Theilung —…

• Valetudinary States

  In Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Nietzsche's valetudinary states — his recurrent, incapacitating illness (the migraine/convalescence cycles of roughly 1877–1881, with their alternations of collapse and euphoric luci…

• Vanishing Ontology (Nancy)

  Nancy's name for the late-period ontological formulation in which Being is no prior or ultimate given but a sending or referral — being-as-being-toward. Locus classicus: Fragile Skin II §3 e (raw 573): "Ontology vanishes here — or makes it…

• Verflechtung

  Husserl's term (verflochten, "interwoven") from "The Origin of Geometry" (HUA 370), adopted by Merleau-Ponty in his 1959–60 course notes as naming the triadic interweaving of man, world, and language — "a thick identity which truly contain…

• Verkehrte Welt (Inverted World, Hegel)

  The verkehrte Welt — inverted world — is one of Hegel's signature dialectical figures, attested in both the Phenomenology of Spirit (p. 96) and the 1813 Wissenschaft der Logik (GW 11 raw 5619 ff.). The cardinal philological feature: the Wd…

• Verschiedenheit (Diversity / Difference, Hegel)

  Verschiedenheit — diversity, difference (external) — is the second of the four Reflexionsbestimmungen in the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 4660 ff.). Verschiedenheit is difference held externally — two terms held apart by a third (the "In…

• Vertical Being

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the irrelative source of transcendence in his late ontology — the "from-above" (Hoheit) that is not a relativity of subject or object but their common source. The cardinal phrase is "All verticality comes from vert…

• Vierdimensionale eigentliche Zeit

  Heidegger's 1962 Zeit und Sein concept of the eigentliche Zeit as lichtendes Reichen of four dimensions — Gewesen, Ankunft, Gegenwart, plus die nähernde Nähe (which is "der Sache nach die erste"). Locus classicus: Zeit und Sein (1962) pp.…

• Virtu (Merleau-Ponty's Machiavelli)

  Merleau-Ponty's redeemed reading of Machiavellian virtu in the "Note on Machiavelli" (1949, collected in Signs as "Note sur Machiavel") — not as the cynical political objectivism that Koestler diagnosed in The Yogi and the Commissar (1945)…

• Voir-Selon / Vivre-Selon

  Frank Chouraqui's systematized technical term for Merleau-Ponty's most accomplished formulation of pre-doxastic faith — a "style of seeing/living" that is partial both in its arbitrary focus and in its structural incompleteness, where beli…

• Volant (flywheel-of-inertia)

  MP's figure for the flesh that conjoins passivity and activity: a mass-in-rotation whose inertia sustains and relaunches a movement, with passivity in the service of élan. Saint Aubert (E&C II Ch I § 1b) excavates the figure as systematica…

• Vollendung der Metaphysik

  Heidegger's name for what Nietzsche's thought is: not the overcoming of Western metaphysics but its completion. Vollendung is the most load-bearing thesis of the Nietzsche I lectures (1936-1939) and the operative frame for Heidegger's read…

• Vorstellung vs. Begriff

  Hegel's contrast between Vorstellung (representation / picture-thinking / "idea" in the loose sense) and Begriff (concept) marks the threshold between unscientific and scientific consciousness. The contrast runs throughout the Phenomenolog…

• Vortex / Tourbillon

  The vortex / tourbillon names a recurring spatializing-temporalizing rotational figure in late MP — the figure that distributes times and spaces without coinciding with any of them. MP uses tourbillon repeatedly in the V&I working notes an…

• Voyance

  Merleau-Ponty's technical term for the double sight by which vision sees farther than it sees — not a second faculty but the structure of all vision once philosophy takes seriously that "the invisible is the outline and the depth of the vi…

• Wahlverwandschaft (Elective Affinity, Hegel)

  Wahlverwandschaft — elective affinity — is the chemical sub-doctrine of reales Maaß in the Maß-section of the Doctrine of Being (GW 21 raw ~5050–5150). Hegel reads the Berthollet-Berzelius dispute on chemical affinity as a categorial dispu…

• Wahre Widerlegung (True Refutation, Hegel)

  Die wahre Widerlegung — true refutation — is Hegel's methodological doctrine that a philosophical system cannot be refuted from outside: it must be entered, recognized as a necessary standpoint, and shown to drive itself past itself. Locat…

• Wahrheit als Gerechtigkeit

  Nietzsche's most extreme determination of truth, in his late notebooks: truth as Gerechtigkeit — justice as the fitting bestowal of constancy by the will to power. Heidegger reads this in Nietzsche I Part III as "der äußerste Wandel der me…

• Walten

  A German verb-and-noun-and-participle family — walten, das Walten, durchwalten, Mitwalten, umwalten, verwalten, Verwaltung, Übergewalt, vorwaltend, bewältigen, unbewältigt, Gewalt, Allgewalt, Gewalt-tat, Gewalt-tätigkeit — that Heidegger d…

• Wechselwirkung (Reciprocal Action, Hegel)

  Wechselwirkung — reciprocal action — is the closing category of the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 6377–6397). Hegel's signature claim: Wechselwirkung is not the truth — it is the dissolution of the Causalitätsverhältnis but not itself the…

• Weight of Thought (Nancy)

  Nancy's name (in The Gravity of Thought and "The Heart of Things") for the structural fact that thought is itself a material event: thought weighs (active sense — ascertains weight, ponders) because it has weight (passive sense — exerts pr…

• Wesen (Essence, Hegel)

  Hegel's Wesen — Essence — is the middle book of the Wissenschaft der Logik and the only section Hegel never revised. Wesen is not a hidden substrate behind Sein but Sein's own zeitlos vergangene recoil into itself: knowledge that wants the…

• Wesen (Verbal Sense, MP's Reading)

  In late Merleau-Ponty, Wesen is read verbally rather than substantively: not the whatness of a thing opposed to its thatness, but the active happening by which a thing is that thing — "the Wesen of the table is 'that which "tablefies" in i…

• Wesentliches Verhältnis (Essential Relation, Hegel)

  The wesentliche Verhältniß — essential relation — is the closing triadic structure of the Erscheinung-section of the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 5637–5848). Three stages, each formally incomplete because identity and difference of the r…

• Whateverness / *quelconque* (Nancy)

  Nancy's name for the thing as some thing — quelque chose, n'importe quoi, une chose quelconque: a "certain something" that is both conceptually indeterminate (lacks essential determinations) and materially concrete (this tree, this stone).…

• Widerspruch (Hegel)

  Hegel's Widerspruch — contradiction — is the most famous and most contested doctrine in his Logic: that contradiction is the positive root of all motion, life, and drive, not a defect to be avoided. The locus classicus is the Anmerkung to…

• Wild Being

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the brute, uncultivated, pre-objective Being that is the project's positive object — the Being that "objective philosophy" (Husserl's term) has covered over and that the late ontology aims to bring to expression. "…

• Wild Structure

  David Morris's name for quantum mechanical systems read as Merleau-Pontian structures operating in wild being — structures that generate their own time-orders rather than presupposing them. The qualifier "wild" applied to structure (not ju…

• Will to Power

  Nietzsche's name for the essential character of reality: "the world is will to power, and that alone" (BGE 36). In Nietzsche's texts it names at once a psychological principle (drives seeking their discharge), a biological principle (life…

• Winnicott's Transitional Object (Saint Aubert's import into MP)

  Donald W. Winnicott's psychoanalytic concept (1953) — the child's teddy bear, blanket, or thumb that is neither fully internal (fantasy) nor fully external (reality) but structures the aire transitionnelle in which creativity is born. Merl…

• Wirklichkeit (Actuality, Hegel)

  Wirklichkeit — actuality — is the central category of the Dritter Abschnitt of the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 5851 ff.). Wirklichkeit is higher than both Existenz and Sein; it is the manifested unity of inner and outer. Hegel's cardina…

• Wolf and Werewolf (loup-garou)

  The wolf is the saturating figure of BS-I — it opens the seminar (pas de loup, "stealthy as a wolf," S1 p. 1) and closes it (Jean-Clet Martin's Marcwulf at S13 pp. 340–343). Every session crosses the wolf in some register: as silent intrud…

• Writing and Living

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the relation between the writer's vocation and the writer's life, and for the quadruple-negation thesis through which the relation is articulated: writing is neither end nor means, neither cause nor effect of life…

• Zeitlichkeit (Temporality)

  Heidegger's name for the ekstatic-horizonal originary time that is the ontological sense of Sorge — the structural totality of Dasein. "Zeitlichkeit enthüllt sich als der Sinn der eigentlichen Sorge" (Sein und Zeit § 65, H. 326). Zeitlichk…

• Zoo and Asylum (the autoptic-sovereign institution)

  The wiki's concept page for the structural-genealogical parallel BS-I develops between the zoological garden and the psychiatric hospital as twin sovereign-institutional spaces. Following Henri Ellenberger's "The Mental Hospital and the Zo…

• Écart

  French for gap, divergence, spread, deviation, or deflection. Lingis's translator's footnote at V&I Ch 1, footnote 4: "Écart. This recurrent term will have to be rendered variously by 'divergence,' 'spread,' 'deviation,' 'separation.'" In…

• Élan vital

  Bergson's name (introduced in Creative Evolution, 1907) for the original impetus of life: a single creative current that "passes from one generation of germs to the next," dividing itself among the divergent lines of evolution "without the…

• Épreuve mutuelle de la chair et de l'être

  Saint Aubert's organizing concept for MP's late ontology: perception is not a one-way relation (observer → observed) nor a bilateral relation (subject ↔ object) but a reciprocal testing (épreuve mutuelle) in which flesh and being evaluate…

• Être humain est un parti / To Be Human Is Also to Take a Side

  Stendhal's phrase from the Lucien Leuwen marginalia, picked up by Merleau-Ponty as the closing political-philosophical thesis of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953). The thesis: the writer's engagement is intrinsic to t…