A guided reading
Merleau-Ponty's late ontology — flesh, chiasm, reversibility, indirect ontology
The mature ontology of The Visible and the Invisible and Eye and Mind: the flesh as an "element" (and not Husserl's Leib — see this claim), the chiasm and reversibility of the sensing–sensible, and the indirect / negative method whose primary witness is painting.
Tour territory (30)
concept source entity question claim motif
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1
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.
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2
Chiasm
Merleau-Ponty's concept for the crossing, encroachment, and mutual enveloping of sensing and sensed — the central structural concept of his late ontology.
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3
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…
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4
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.
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