Browse — tag-merleau-ponty

Tag: merleau-ponty

Pages tagged with merleau-ponty.

327 pages

• 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…

• Adventures of the Dialectic Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Joseph Bien), 1955

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Joseph Bien, Northwestern UP 1973) Year: 1955 (original French: Les Aventures de la dialectique, Gallimard) Type: book

• 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…

• Ambiguity and the Absolute Frank Chouraqui, 2014

  Author(s): Frank Chouraqui Year: 2014 (Fordham University Press, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series; ISBN 978-0-8232-5411-8; John D. Caputo, series editor) Type: Book (monograph)

• 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…

• 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…

• 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 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.)

• Arthur Koestler

  Hungarian-born British novelist and journalist (1905–1983); communist 1931–38; broke with the Party after the Moscow Trials and the Hitler-Stalin Pact; author of Darkness at Noon (1940, written in German as Sonnenfinsternis; first publishe…

• 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…

• Audit of the working-memory claim that the ingester missed science secrète after 15 prior MP sources

  A meta-audit of a working-memory claim that has been used rhetorically in Paper A's reflexive argument. The claim is that an LLM ingester, having processed 15 prior Merleau-Ponty sources, failed to extract science secrète — taken as confir…

• 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…

• 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 (être au monde)

  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…

• 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…

• 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"),…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 2010

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) Year: 2010 (English, Welsh trans.) / 2001 (Verdier French ed.) / Lectures delivered 1949–1952 Type: lecture-course

• Chouraqui's Interpretive Bet and the Recursive Paradox

  Question: What question would an opponent ask after reading Ambiguity and the Absolute that Chouraqui would have the hardest time answering?

• 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,…

• Circulus Vitiosus Deus: Merleau-Ponty's Ontology of Ontology Frank Chouraqui, 2016

  Author(s): Frank Chouraqui (Leiden University) Year: 2016 Type: Journal article (Studia Phaenomenologica XVI, pp. 469–487)

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Conférences en Amérique, notes de cours et autres textes — Inédits II (1947–1949) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 2022

  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)

• 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)

• 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…

• Cristallisation (Stendhal → Breton → MP)

  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…

• Daniel Guérin

  French historian, anarchist-communist activist, and political writer (1904–1988); author of La Lutte des classes sous la Première République (2 vols., 1946), Fascisme et grand capital (1936), Où va le peuple américain? (1950), and many wor…

• 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…

• Did Gurwitsch cause MP's anti-Husserl turn?

  Saint Aubert (E&C II Ch IV §§ 2–3) argues that MP's late anti-Husserlian turn is directly caused by Aron Gurwitsch's 1957 Théorie du champ de la conscience. The hardest anti-Husserl notes (NT April 1960: "cela n'est pas compatible avec la…

• 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…

• Does MP replace consciousness with the unconscious, or only radicalize non-representational consciousness?

  Saint Aubert (E&C II Ch VI) defends a replacement thesis: the late MP — across Notes sur le corps (1960), Notes de travail (1959–61), and the Visible and Invisible working notes — systematically substitutes "unconscious" for "consciousness…

• Does the retrograde movement of the true solve or deepen historical relativism?

  It does both — and this is its point, not its failure. Merleau-Ponty's radicalization of Bergson's phrase is not a theorem that dissolves the relativism problem but a reframing that denies the problem's usual formulation. The standard rela…

• Don Beith

  Philosopher specializing in Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology of nature, and the philosophy of embodiment. Author of The Birth of Sense: Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy (Ohio University Press, 2018), which develops the concep…

• 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…

• 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 de Saint Aubert

  French philosopher and leading contemporary interpreter of Merleau-Ponty. Affiliated with the Husserl Archives in Paris (UMR 8547 ENS/CNRS). Author of a five-volume sequence that has systematically reconstructed MP's thought from the unpub…

• 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…

• 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…

• Ernst Cassirer

  German neo-Kantian philosopher (1874–1945), best known for the Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (3 vols., 1923–29) and for the 1929 Davos disputation with Heidegger. For this wiki, Cassirer matters chiefly as the silent source of Merlea…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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

• 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…

• 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…

• 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)…

• Four-element intersection (science secrète + déformation cohérente + chiasm + Stiftung) and its non-MP precedents

  > Status note (2026-05-07). This question page was written when claims#science-secrete-stiftung-chiasm was live. The claim's status changed from live to contested on 2026-05-05 (Phase 8 eighth run; user-adjudicated Option γ — the α–δ split…

• Frank Chouraqui

  French-trained, Anglophone-publishing philosopher of phenomenology (Leiden University), specialist on the structural convergence between Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty on the question of truth and on the formal structure of "intra-ontology" —…

• 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…

• From encountering foreign languages to the language of phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and *The Problem of Speech* Hayden Kee, 2025

  Author(s): Hayden Kee Year: 2025 Type: paper (peer-reviewed journal article, Continental Philosophy Review 58: 75–97)

• From hinge to chiasm: what changes in the transition?

  The I&P extraction note identifies "hinge" (charnière, gond, pivot) as a HUB-weight recurring motif across the 1954–55 courses, appearing at [3](2), [22], [127](15), [179](45), [215 verso](5). Institution "exists between others and myself,…

• From Johann to Maurice: Science and Expression in the Philosophical Praxis of Medicine Timm Heinbokel, 2021

  Author(s): Timm Heinbokel Year: 2021 (Human Studies 44(4): 559–579, Open Access CC BY 4.0; accepted 3 August 2021, published online 18 October 2021) Type: paper (peer-reviewed journal article; theoretical / philosophical)

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• H_synth re-audit on its original textual basis (E&M + PoP + Indirect Language + Saint Aubert 2021)

  > Status note (2026-05-07). This question page was written when claims#science-secrete-stiftung-chiasm was live. The claim's status changed from live to contested on 2026-05-05 (Phase 8 eighth run; user-adjudicated Option γ — the α–δ split…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Healing Schneider: On Merleau-Ponty's Ethical System of Play Frank Chouraqui, 2025

  Author: Frank Chouraqui (Leiden University) Year: 2025 Type: paper (Philosophies 10:1, 3)

• 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…

• Henri Maldiney

  French philosopher, phenomenologist of art and aesthetic experience, professor at the École des Hautes Études of Ghent and (from 1955–56) the University of Lyon. MP's earliest interlocuteur attentif and — per the Inédits I (Mimésis 2022) e…

• Henri Wallon

  French developmental psychologist and Marxist politician (1879–1962), founder of the Enfance journal. For the purposes of this wiki, Wallon matters as the primary empirical source of Merleau-Ponty's 1950–51 Sorbonne course on The Child's R…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• How does Merleau-Ponty's interrogation differ from Husserl's reduction?

  Husserl's transcendental reduction brackets the natural attitude to recover the constituting acts of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty's interrogation refuses that move: the faith cannot be bracketed because it is the structure of any bracketin…

• 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…

• How does MP's seinsgeschichte tension with Heidegger bear on the 1959→1961 reversal?

  The two are the same problem seen from opposite sides. In 1959 Merleau-Ponty anchors ontology in the "thick, opaque present" and refuses the Hegel/Marx/Nietzsche detour; by 1960–61 he gives a whole course on exactly that detour. The revers…

• Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1969

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1947 (French original); 1969 (English translation by John O'Neill, Beacon Press) Type: book

• 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…

• Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology Maurice Merleau-Ponty (ed. Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo), 2002

  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

• 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.…

• 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…

• In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1970

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1970 (English combined edition; Part 1 original 1953, Part 2 original 1968) Type: Book (combined volume: inaugural lecture + course summaries)

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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 and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955) Maurice Merleau-Ponty (foreword by Claude Lefort), 2010

  Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Foreword by Claude Lefort; Text established by Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, and Stéphanie Ménasé Year: French edition 2003 (Belin); English translation 2010 (Northwestern) Translators: Leonard Lawlor…

• 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…

• 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…

• Is 'Freud without demonology' a consistent method?

  Query: Does MP's perceptual rereading of Freud preserve or domesticate the clinical insights it claims to retain?

• Is ambiguïté the sortie from ambivalence?

  Saint Aubert (E&C II Ch I §§ 2–3) defends a novel philological thesis: contrary to the received cliché of Merleau-Ponty as "philosopher of ambiguity" in a weak, irenic sense, ambiguïté and ambivalence are not synonyms but technical opposit…

• Is constitutive non-coincidence the meta-structure of MP's philosophy?

  At least six central structures in the wiki share the same formal feature — an essential, productive failure to coincide:

• Is Cybernetics the Same Philosophical Enemy for Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty?

  Short answer. Both clauses of the question are partly true, but the or is too strong. Cybernetics (in Heidegger 1964) and pensée opératoire (in Merleau-Ponty 1960–61) target the same structural phenomenon — the reduction of beings to manip…

• Is Phenomenology of Perception already the break with Sartre?

  Yes — philosophically, if not socially. Part Three Ch III of Phenomenology of Perception — the chapter on freedom that closes the book — is a chapter-length rejoinder to Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943). Sartre is never named. Every c…

• Is Schneider a limiting case of sleep?

  The Schneider case (PhP 1945) and dedifferentiation (Passivity course 1954–55) describe the same structural event at different scales:

• 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…

• Jacques Lacan

  French psychoanalyst (1901–1981), founder of the École freudienne de Paris and of a structuralist-linguistic rereading of Freud. For the purposes of this wiki, Lacan matters primarily as the author of "Le stade du miroir comme formateur du…

• Jakob von Uexküll

  Estonian-German biologist (1864–1944), founder of theoretical biology and biosemiotics, principal scientific source for Merleau-Ponty's 1956–58 Nature courses (Course 1: Animality, Course 2: Animality, the Human Body, Transition to Culture…

• Jean Hyppolite

  French philosopher, the dominant Hegel-translator-and-commentator of the post-war French philosophical scene; MP's ENS condisciple, longtime friend, and intellectual interlocutor. Author of the historic French translation of Hegel's Phänom…

• Jean Piaget

  Swiss developmental psychologist and genetic epistemologist (1896–1980). For the wiki, Piaget matters as the contrast figure against whom Merleau-Ponty sets his own developmental phenomenology — and against whom Wallon is silently preferre…

• 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…

• Joseph Stalin

  Soviet politician (1878–1953); General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death; effective ruler of the USSR from the late 1920s; principal author of the doctrine of "socialism in one country" and arch…

• 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…

• 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;…

• Leon Trotsky

  Russian revolutionary and Marxist theorist (1879–1940); leader of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War; principal Bolshevik opponent of Stalin after Lenin's death; expelled from the USSR in 1929; founder of the Fourth International in 193…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Mariana Larison

  Argentinian phenomenologist working on Merleau-Ponty's institution-concept, philosophy of history, and dialectic. Author of L'être en forme (2016) and Vers une phénoménologie de l'institution. Avec et au-delà de Merleau-Ponty (Zetabooks 20…

• Marilena Chauí

  Brazilian philosopher (USP — University of São Paulo); a major Lusophone interpreter of Merleau-Ponty's politics. Her 2009 USP course manuscript Merleau-Ponty e a política — unpublished, preserved in tapescript form with original paginatio…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Max Weber

  German sociologist, political economist, and philosopher of history (1864–1920); author of Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1905), Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (posth. 1922), "Politik als Beruf" (1919), and methodol…

• 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, élan vital, et…

• 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…

• Merleau-Ponty [I] (manuscript draft of 'Merleau-Ponty Vivant', 1961/1984) Jean-Paul Sartre, 1984

  Author(s): Jean-Paul Sartre Year: Manuscript dated July 1961 (referenced internally: "two months of absence" from MP's death on 3 May 1961); JBSP translation published 1984 Type: philosophical-biographical essay (eulogy / memoir)

• 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 and the Essence of Nature: A Return to Elemental Symbolism Taylor Knight, 2024

  Author(s): Taylor Knight Year: 2024 Type: Book (Edinburgh University Press, New Perspectives in Ontology series) Foreword: Emmanuel Falque

• Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth Frank Chouraqui, 2016

  Author(s): Frank Chouraqui (University of Leiden) Year: 2016 Type: Paper (Research in Phenomenology 46, pp. 54-69)

• 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)

• Merleau-Ponty: Institution-Ontology-Politics Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (ed.), 2026

  Author(s): Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (ed.) Year: 2026 Type: edited volume (12 chapters + Introduction; 3 thematic Parts)

• 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…

• Motivation (MP)

  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…

• 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…

• 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 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…

• Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1956–60) Maurice Merleau-Ponty (compiled Dominique Séglard, tr. Robert Vallier), 2003

  Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty Compiler/editor (French): Dominique Séglard Translator: Robert Vallier Original French: La Nature: Notes, cours du Collège de France (Éditions du Seuil, 1995) English edition: Northwestern University Press, 20…

• 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…

• Nikolai Bukharin

  Russian Bolshevik and Marxist theorist (1888–1938); editor of Pravda (1918–29); General Secretary of the Comintern (1926–29); author of The ABC of Communism (1920, with Preobrazhensky), Historical Materialism (1921), The Economics of the T…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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 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…

• 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)

• 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…

• 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)

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945

  Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1945 (this reading: Donald A. Landes translation, Routledge 2012, with Foreword by Taylor Carman and Claude Lefort's 1974 essay "Maurice Merleau-Ponty") Type: Book (Merleau-Ponty's Docteur ès lettres maj…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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.…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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-…

• 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…

• 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…

• Rajiv Kaushik

  Professor of Philosophy at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Specialist in Merleau-Ponty's ontology, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. Author of Merleau-Ponty Between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology (SUNY…

• 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…

• Renaud Barbaras

  French phenomenologist (b. 1955), Professor at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Largely credited with sparking the Merleau-Ponty "renaissance" in French phenomenology in the early 1990s. Author of The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-…

• 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…

• 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…

• Ricardo Mendoza-Canales

  Spanish-Peruvian phenomenologist working at Villanova University; editor of Merleau-Ponty: Institution-Ontology-Politics (Brill, 2026). Mendoza-Canales' chapter 4 — "The Adventures of Experience: Merleau-Ponty on Genesis and Institution" —…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Sense and Non-Sense Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1964

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1948 (French original); 1964 (English translation) Type: book (collection of essays, 13 chapters + author's Preface + Translators' Introduction)

• 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 canonical passage is V&I Ch 4, pp…

• 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…

• 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)

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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)…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Tamara Caraus

  Contemporary phenomenologist working on Merleau-Ponty, Marxism, the proletariat, and the question. Contributor of chapter 12 — "Intensifying the Question: Merleau-Ponty and the Institution of the Proletariat" — to Merleau-Ponty: Institutio…

• Ted Toadvine

  American philosopher and Merleau-Ponty scholar; author of The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). A key interpreter of MP's later philosophy of nature, animality, and the pre-pe…

• 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)

• 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 Anonymous Temporality of Animal Life: Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze on the Passive Syntheses of the Organic Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault, 2025

  Author(s): Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault Year: 2025 Type: paper (journal article, Continental Philosophy Review 58:445–467)

• 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 Birth of Sense: Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy Don Beith, 2018

  Author(s): Don Beith Year: 2018 Type: book (Ohio University Press, Series in Continental Thought No. 52)

• 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 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 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 Possibility of Philosophy: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1959-1961 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 2022

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty (ed. Stéphanie Ménasé, foreword Claude Lefort, trans. Keith Whitmoyer) Year: 2022 (English; French edition 1996, Gallimard) Type: Book (posthumous course notes)

• 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 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 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 Structure of Behavior Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1942

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1942 (French original); 1963 English translation by Alden L. Fisher Type: book — Merleau-Ponty's first published work, defended as primary doctoral thesis in 1939, published 1942 by PUF; the propaedeu…

• 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 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 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 Visible and the Invisible Maurice Merleau-Ponty (manuscript), edited by Claude Lefort, 1964

  Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (manuscript, posthumous) Editor: Claude Lefort Translator: Alphonso Lingis Year: Le Visible et l'invisible, Editions Gallimard, 1964; English translation Northwestern University Press, 1968 Type: book — incomp…

• Three Orders of Signification (Physical / Vital / Human)

  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)

  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…

• Timm Heinbokel

  Pathologist (Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin) and philosopher of medicine working primarily on Merleau-Ponty's relevance for medical praxis. Author of "From Johann to Maurice: Science and Expression in the Philosophical Praxis of Medi…

• 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…

• 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 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,…

• 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…

• Vers une ontologie indirecte Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, 2006

  Author: Emmanuel de Saint Aubert Year: 2006 Type: book Subtitle: Sources et enjeux critiques de l'appel à l'ontologie chez Merleau-Ponty Publisher: Vrin, Bibliothèque d'histoire de la philosophie ISBN: 978-2-7116-1852-1

• 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)…

• Visible and 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)…

• Vladimir Lenin

  Russian revolutionary and Marxist theorist (1870–1924); leader of the Bolshevik faction from 1903, of the Russian Revolution from 1917, and head of the Soviet government until his death. Author of What Is To Be Done? (1902), Materialism an…

• 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…

• 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…

• What changes if flesh is already Marxist (1844 Manuscripts) rather than invented in V&I?

  The decisive fact, flagged on flesh-as-element: in Course 3 of The Possibility of Philosophy (lines 1858–1894), Merleau-Ponty reads Marx's 1844 Manuscripts and arrives at the formulation "history is, in this sense, the very flesh of humani…

• What does Taddio (2025) actually contain on the science secrète / tacit-Gestalt identification?

  > Status note (2026-05-07). This question page was written when claims#science-secrete-stiftung-chiasm was live. The claim's status changed from live to contested on 2026-05-05 (Phase 8 eighth run; user-adjudicated Option γ — the α–δ split…

• What happens to Descartes's oscillation in the late ontology?

  Query: Does V&I resolve the Cartesian oscillation that Nature Course 1 identifies, or does the chiasm inherit it as a structural feature?

• What is Merleau-Ponty's relation to Ruyer's finalism?

  A split. Merleau-Ponty in the 1954–55 Institution course follows raymond-ruyer's 1953 Les Temps Modernes article "Les conceptions nouvelles de l'instinct" closely for data — Lorenz on imprinting, Tinbergen on supra-normal stimuli, Gesell o…

• Where Is Negation in Merleau-Ponty's Ontology? Symbolic Formation and the Implex Rajiv Kaushik, 2021

  Author: Rajiv Kaushik Year: 2021 Type: Journal article (Research in Phenomenology 51: 372–393)

• 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…

• Wild Structure and Melting Time: On Quantum Mechanics and Matter as Change in Merleau-Ponty's Temporal Ontology David Morris, 2024

  Author: David Morris (Concordia University) Year: 2024 Type: paper (journal article) Journal: Chiasmi International 26 (2024), pp. 157-173. DOI: 10.5840/chiasmi20242616

• Winnicott's Transitional Object (Saint Aubert's Import)

  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…

• 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…

• 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 et chair chez Merleau-Ponty Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, 2023

  Author: Emmanuel de Saint Aubert Year: 2023 Type: Paper (lecture-derived article, French) Publication: Ágora Filosófica 23(3), pp. 5–35. DOI: 10.25247/P1982-999X.2023.v23n3.p05-35 HAL: hal-04284557 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

• Être et chair II. L'épreuve perceptive de l'être Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, 2021

  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