Hayden Kee

Phenomenologist working primarily on Merleau-Ponty, language, and embodied / enactive cognition. Author of "From encountering foreign languages to the language of phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and *The Problem of Speech*" (Continental Philosophy Review 58: 75–97, 2025) — the wiki's first entry-point to Merleau-Ponty's 1953–54 Le problème de la parole lectures (PbP), via secondary commentary.

Key Points

  • Sustained scholarly engagement with MP on language: Kee's published work centres on MP's middle-period treatments of speech and expression and traces their methodological consequences for the late ontology. Multiple papers cited in the 2025 article (see below).
  • Primary research themes: MP's speaking / spoken speech distinction (2018); the phenomenological reduction in Structure of Behavior (2019); horizons-of-words / instrumental analogy in language (2020); MP's social-affective account of language acquisition (2022a); MP's transition from language to nature in the Collège de France courses (2022b); lateral / concrete universality and language (2025).
  • Methodological position: Kee combines close textual reconstruction with systematic comparison across MP's corpus. He is not primarily a synthesist or speculative philosopher; his contribution is to make the internal coherence of MP's middle-period thinking on language visible against the late ontology that follows. The 2025 paper exemplifies this approach — it stages PbP as both culminating the middle-period focus on language and initiating the transition to vertical / wild being.
  • Engagement with cognitive-science / enactivism: Kee draws on Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher's Linguistic Bodies (MIT 2018) for a contemporary picture of language as "concrete open totality," and engages contemporary linguistics (Mithen 2024, Tomasello 2009, Evans & Levinson 2009) to update MP's PbP-era cases against universal grammar. The orientation places him within the Merleau-Pontian wing of contemporary embodied / enactive cognitive science.

Publications cited in the wiki

(Drawn from kee-2025-foreign-languages-phenomenology reference list and footnotes.)

  • Kee, H. 2018. "Phenomenology and ontology of language and expression: Merleau-Ponty on speaking and spoken speech." Human Studies 41 (3): 415–435. — On the *parole parlante / parlée* distinction.
  • Kee, H. 2019. "Phenomenological reduction in Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior: An alternative approach to the naturalization of phenomenology." European Journal of Philosophy 28: 15–32. — On MP's non-Cartesian path into the reduction; relevant to propaedeutic-dialectic.
  • Kee, H. 2020. "Horizons of the word: Words and tools in perception and action." Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19: 905–932. — On the instrumental analogy for language; relevant to horizons-of-language.
  • Kee, H. 2022a. "En la infancia, el niño está atraído por el lenguaje: Merleau-Ponty y los orígenes socio-afectivos del habla." Actas 15. — On MP's social-affective account of language acquisition.
  • Kee, H. 2022b. "In search of lost speech: from language to nature in Merleau-Ponty's Collège de France courses." HUMAN.AMENTE Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (41): 149–76. — On the transition from language to nature in MP's late thought; relevant to wild-being and indirect-ontology.
  • Kee, H. 2025. "From encountering foreign languages to the language of phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and The Problem of Speech." Continental Philosophy Review 58: 75–97. — The wiki's ingested source.

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