Browse — tag-aesthetics

Tag: aesthetics

Pages tagged with aesthetics.

89 pages

• 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…

• Alberto Giacometti

  Swiss sculptor and painter (1901–1966). In "Eye and Mind", Giacometti provides two key formulations for MP's argument:

• 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…

• André Bazin

  French film theorist (1918–1958); co-founder of Cahiers du cinéma (1951) and spiritual father of the Nouvelle Vague. For the purposes of this wiki he matters because he is the only contemporary cinema figure whom Merleau-Ponty names in the…

• André Breton

  French poet and essayist (1896–1966), founder of Surrealism. In the wiki's context, the source of the "sublime point" concept that Merleau-Ponty adopts as a structural figure for the coincidence of antinomies — the point where "life and de…

• André Malraux

  French novelist, art theorist, Resistance hero, and statesman (1901–1976). Author of Les Voix du silence (1951; English: The Voices of Silence, 1953), the three-volume Psychologie de l'Art (1947, 1949, 1950: Le Musée imaginaire / La Créati…

• 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 and Psychology: A Phenomenological Inquiry into the Nature of Pictorial Representations Luca Taddio, 2025

  Author(s): Luca Taddio (University of Udine) Year: 2025 (accepted 6 May 2025) Type: journal article (Author's contribution: solely L.T.)

• 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…

• Auguste Rodin

  French sculptor (1840–1917). In "Eye and Mind" §4, Rodin is MP's primary interlocutor on the problem of movement in painting and sculpture. Rodin's theory of the "paradoxical arrangement" — depicting the body in an attitude it never at any…

• Caleb Faul

  Department of Philosophy and Ethics, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks. Author of "Ontologically Interactive Painting: On Susan Rothenberg's Three Heads," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 55:2 (2024), 184–197 — the wi…

• 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…

• 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…

• Conférences en Europe et premiers cours à Lyon — Inédits I (1946–1947) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 2022

  Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) Year: notes 1946–1947 (composition); 2022 (posthumous critical edition) Type: notes (manuscript notes for conferences and courses)

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• E. H. Gombrich

  Austrian-British art historian and philosopher of art (1909–2001). His Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960) develops a resemblance-and-schema account of pictorial representation: pictures represent…

• 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…

• Emmanuel Alloa

  Contemporary continental philosopher specializing in phenomenology, aesthetics, and the legacy of Merleau-Ponty. On the wiki, Alloa is principally an editorial presence: co-editor (with Chouraqui and Kaushik) of Merleau-Ponty and Contempor…

• 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…

• Erwin Panofsky

  German-American art historian (1892–1968), a founder of modern iconology and the theory of "symbolic forms" in art history. In the wiki's context, Merleau-Ponty's primary source for the history of Renaissance perspective in the 1954–55 Ins…

• Eye and Mind Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1961

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Carleton Dallery) Year: 1961 (written July–August 1960; published January 1961 in Art de France vol. I, no. 1) Type: essay

• 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…

• Galen A. Johnson

  Senior Anglophone Merleau-Ponty scholar; co-author (with Carbone and Saint Aubert) of Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature (Fordham University Press, 2020) — a genuine ten-year co-authorship rather than a collecte…

• Georg Lukács

  Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary theorist, and political figure (1885–1971); author of Die Theorie des Romans (1916), Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923 — the single most important work for MP's engagement), Der junge Hegel (19…

• 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…

• Gilbert Simondon

  French philosopher (1924–1989) best known for his theory of individuation and for his rehabilitation of the philosophical significance of technical objects. On this wiki he matters primarily as the background figure behind dividuation (Car…

• Gilles Deleuze

  French philosopher (1925–1995), author of Difference and Repetition (1968), Logic of Sense (1969), and (with Félix Guattari) Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Although a generation younger than Merleau-Ponty and not typic…

• 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…

• Henri Matisse

  French painter (1869–1954). In "Eye and Mind" §4, Matisse is MP's exemplar for the line as structural filament rather than contour. "Matisse's women were not immediately women; they became women" — the line does not copy a pre-existing for…

• How does MP read cinema via Gestalt?

  MP's cinema writings run on a single spine: Gestalt psychology provides the perceptual concept (the "temporal Gestalt") that lets MP invert Bergson's condemnation of cinema into a validation. Cinema is not a falsification of duration but a…

• 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"…

• 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);…

• Jacques Derrida

  French philosopher (1930–2004), founder of deconstruction, author of Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), Margins of Philosophy (1972), The Truth in Painting (1978), The Post Card (1980), Specters of Marx (1993), On Touch…

• Jean-François Lyotard

  French philosopher (1924–1998); phenomenologist-turned-figural-theorist and later theorist of the "postmodern condition." For the purposes of this wiki he is primarily relevant as Carbone's interlocutor on the ontology of the screen — the…

• Jean-Luc Nancy

  French philosopher (1940-2021), major figure in contemporary continental philosophy. Author of works on community (The Inoperative Community), the body (Corpus, Sexistence), art (The Muses), and the nature of sense and touch. His thought d…

• 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…

• 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…

• Lisa van Sorge

  Phenomenologist at Tilburg University working in contemporary Dutch phenomenological aesthetics. Author of "Painting as an Embodied Act of Framing: Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetics with Merleau-Ponty and Derrida" (Open Access, CC-BY-4.…

• Luca Taddio

  Italian philosopher at the University of Udine, working at the intersection of Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology, Italian Gestalt experimental phenomenology (Trieste school: Bozzi, Burigana, Massironi, Kanizsa), and the philosophy of pictorial…

• 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…

• Marcel Proust

  French novelist (1871–1922), author of À la recherche du temps perdu. In the wiki's context, Merleau-Ponty's privileged literary source for phenomenological evidence about love, memory, time, the body's grasp of space-time, and the "Albert…

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  French phenomenologist and philosopher (1908-1961). Professor at the Collège de France from 1952 until his sudden death from a heart attack on May 3, 1961 — he was reading Descartes's Dioptrique and preparing notes for his course "Cartesia…

• Mauro Carbone

  Italian philosopher (b. 1956) working primarily in French; specialist in Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics and ontology, and in the philosophical significance of cinema and digital screens. Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France; P…

• Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy Emmanuel Alloa, Frank Chouraqui, Rajiv Kaushik (eds.), 2019

  Author(s): Emmanuel Alloa, Frank Chouraqui, Rajiv Kaushik (eds.) Year: 2019 Type: Edited volume (14 essays + epilogue), SUNY Press

• Merleau-Ponty Between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology Rajiv Kaushik, 2019

  Author(s): Rajiv Kaushik Year: 2019 Type: book (SUNY Press, Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

• Merleau-Ponty on painting, sedimentation, and the cultural world Andrew Inkpin, 2026

  Author(s): Andrew Inkpin (University of Melbourne) Year: 2026 Type: paper (peer-reviewed journal article, European Journal of Philosophy e70063)

• Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology in the light of Kant's Third Critique and Schelling's Real-Idealismus Sebastian Gardner, 2016

  Author(s): Sebastian Gardner (University College London) Year: 2016 Type: Paper (Continental Philosophy Review, DOI 10.1007/s11007-016-9393-1)

• Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature Galen A. Johnson, Mauro Carbone, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, 2020

  Author(s): Galen A. Johnson, Mauro Carbone, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert Year: 2020 Type: Book (co-authored, Fordham University Press, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series)

• 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…

• 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…

• Nelson Goodman

  American philosopher (1906–1998), exponent of analytic aesthetics and constructive nominalism. His Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (1968; 2nd ed. 1976) develops a denotational/symbolic theory of pictorial representatio…

• 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…

• Ontologically Interactive Painting: On Susan Rothenberg's Three Heads Caleb Faul, 2024

  Author(s): Caleb Faul (Department of Philosophy and Ethics, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks) Year: 2024 Type: paper (Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 55:2, 184–197)

• Painting as an Embodied Act of Framing: Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetics with Merleau-Ponty and Derrida Lisa van Sorge, 2025

  Author(s): Lisa van Sorge (Tilburg University) Year: 2025 (Accepted 22 April 2025; Published online 25 July 2025) Type: paper (Open Access, CC-BY-4.0; journal not stated in extracted PDF metadata)

• 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…

• Paul Claudel

  French poet, dramatist, and essayist (1868–1955), author of Art poétique (1907). In the wiki's context, one of Merleau-Ponty's most deeply embedded literary sources — the origin of co-naissance and, through the Treatise on Co-Naissance, th…

• Paul Cézanne

  French post-Impressionist painter (1839–1906). For Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne is the paradigm case of phenomenology as attention and wonder, and the artist through whom MP articulates his thesis that painting is "philosophy in action." From Ph…

• Paul Gauguin

  French post-impressionist painter (1848–1903). Central subject of Carbone's Flesh of Images ch. 2 ("It Takes a Long Time to Become Wild"). Although Merleau-Ponty himself never focused philosophical attention on Gauguin, Carbone argues that…

• Paul Klee

  Swiss-German painter (1879-1940). In Merleau-Ponty's Course Notes, Klee is the primary exemplar of fundamental-thought-in-art — the implicit ontological inquiry that painting conducts. Merleau-Ponty's commentary on Klee "seems to have push…

• Paul Valéry

  French poet, essayist, and philosopher (1871–1945). Source of two key terms in Merleau-Ponty's late ontology — "chiasm" and "implex" — and of the artist-becomes-organ figure MP cites in Eye and Mind. The 2026-04-28 ingest of Œuvres II Pléi…

• 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…

• Philippe Grosos

  French philosopher; author of Des profondeurs de nos cavernes — Préhistoire – Art – Philosophie (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 2021), a book-length philosophical engagement with prehistoric cave art. Grosos advocates a shift in philosophica…

• 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…

• Philosophy-Screens: From Cinema to the Digital Revolution Mauro Carbone (trans. Marta Nijhuis), 2019

  Author(s): Mauro Carbone; translated by Marta Nijhuis Year: 2019 (original French: Philosophie-écrans. Du cinéma à la révolution numérique, Vrin 2016) Publisher: SUNY Press (SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, ed. Dennis J.…

• 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…

• 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…

• René Magritte

  Belgian surrealist painter (1898–1967). His paintings — especially Le faux miroir (1928), La condition humaine (1933), Le Jockey perdu (1948), Golconde (1953), Le Blanc-seing (1965), L'idée (1966), Le pèlerin (1966), Paysage de Baucis (196…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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 canonical passage is V&I Ch 4, pp…

• Signs Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1960

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1960 (French, Gallimard); 1964 (English, Northwestern UP, trans. Richard C. McCleary) Type: book (collection of essays + a new Introduction)

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1992

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1992 (English collection); pieces span 1933–1961 Type: book (anthology)

• The Body and Embodiment: A Philosophical Guide Frank Chouraqui, 2021

  Author(s): Frank Chouraqui Year: 2021 Type: book (philosophical guide / textbook, Rowman & Littlefield)

• The Crooked Finger of Chauvet-Pont d'Arc: Retrieving the Depth of Time Through a Transtemporal Account of Parietal Art Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault, 2024

  Author(s): Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault Year: 2024 Type: paper (journal article, Chiasmi International vol. 26, pp. 263–282)

• The Flesh of Images: Merleau-Ponty Between Painting and Cinema Mauro Carbone (trans. Marta Nijhuis), 2015

  Author(s): Mauro Carbone (trans. Marta Nijhuis) Year: 2015 (English, SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy); 2011 (French original, La chair des images, Vrin) Type: book (6 chapters + Introduction)

• The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays Maurice Merleau-Ponty (ed. James M. Edie), 1964

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; edited and introduced by James M. Edie Year: 1964 (English); original pieces 1946–1961 Type: collection (book)

• The Prose of the World Maurice Merleau-Ponty (ed. Claude Lefort, trans. John O'Neill), 1973

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; edited by Claude Lefort; translated by John O'Neill Year: Written ~1950-52; published posthumously 1969 (French) / 1973 (English) Type: book (unfinished)

• The Sensible World and the World of Expression Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Bryan Smyth), 1953

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; translated with introduction and notes by Bryan Smyth Year: 1953 (course delivered); 2011 (French publication); 2020 (English translation) Type: Course notes (personal lecture notes + working notes)

• The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy Mauro Carbone, 2004

  Author(s): Mauro Carbone Year: 2004 Type: book (commentary; collection of reworked essays)

• The Voices of Silence André Malraux, 1953

  Author(s): André Malraux (1901–1976) Year: 1953 (English) / 1951 (French Les Voix du silence) Type: book

• 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…

• Vivian Sobchack

  American film theorist; author of The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992) and Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004). Professor emerita at UCLA. On this wiki she matters as the phenomenologica…

• 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…