Browse — tag-language
Tag: language
Pages tagged with language.
35 pages
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Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) Year: 2010 (English, Welsh trans.) / 2001 (Verdier French ed.) / Lectures delivered 1949–1952 Type: lecture-course
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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…
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Conférences en Amérique, notes de cours et autres textes — Inédits II (1947–1949)
Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) Year: notes 1947–1949 (composition); 2022 (posthumous critical edition) Type: notes (manuscript notes for course, conferences, and reading-notes)
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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…
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Ferdinand de Saussure
Swiss linguist (1857–1913), founder of structural linguistics, author of the Course in General Linguistics (posthumously compiled from lectures, 1916). In Signs, especially "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" and "On the Phenomen…
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From encountering foreign languages to the language of phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and *The Problem of Speech*
Author(s): Hayden Kee Year: 2025 Type: paper (peer-reviewed journal article, Continental Philosophy Review 58: 75–97)
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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 Philoso…
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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…
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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…
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Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; edited by Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo Year: 2002 (course delivered 1959–60; notes preserved at Bibliothèque Nationale) Type: Course notes + editorial apparatus
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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"…
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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…
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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…
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Jean Fourquet
French linguist (1899–2001). Author of "La Notion de Verbe," Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique 43 (1) (1950): 72–96. The 1950 Fourquet paper is the textual anchor for Merleau-Ponty's critique of naïve linguistic universalism i…
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Joseph Vendryes
French linguist (1875–1960). Author of Le langage. Introduction linguistique à l'histoire (1921; English trans. Language. A Linguistic Introduction to History, trans. Paul Radin, Kegan Paul 1925). Merleau-Ponty cites Vendryes repeatedly ac…
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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;…
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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…
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Merleau-Ponty Between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology
Author(s): Rajiv Kaushik Year: 2019 Type: book (SUNY Press, Contemporary Continental Philosophy)
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Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature
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)
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Merleau-Ponty: Institution-Ontology-Politics
Author(s): Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (ed.) Year: 2026 Type: edited volume (12 chapters + Introduction; 3 thematic Parts)
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Signs
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)
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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…
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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…
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The Prose of the World
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)
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The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy
Author(s): Mauro Carbone Year: 2004 Type: book (commentary; collection of reworked essays)
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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…
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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…
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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. "…
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Être et chair II. L'épreuve perceptive de l'être
Author: Emmanuel de Saint Aubert Year: 2021 Type: Book (French, untranslated) Publisher: Paris: Vrin, « Bibliothèque d'histoire de la philosophie » ISBN: 978-2-7116-3021-9