Browse — tag · method

Tag: method

Pages tagged with method.

76 pages

• Absolute Knowing

  Absolutes Wissen — the standpoint achieved at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Chapter VIII, §§788–808, raw lines 4691–4851). The journey's terminus: Geist knows itself as Geist; consciousness and self-consciousness have become iden…

• 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

• Aporia (Productive Impasse)

  Aporia (ἀπορία — literally "no way through," hence impasse, perplexity) is the state of acknowledged not-knowing in which Plato's "Socratic" dialogues characteristically end and the later dialogues repeatedly turn. Its distinctively Platon…

• Aufheben (sublate)

  Aufheben is Hegel's signature dialectical operation: a single German verb that simultaneously means to cancel (tollere, negieren), to preserve (aufbewahren), and to lift up (emporheben). Hegel takes this triple lexical structure as evidenc…

• Aufhebung

  Hegel's term for negation-that-preserves-and-elevates — the structural operation by which the dialectic moves from one shape of consciousness to its successor without simple abolition. Pinkard's 2018 Cambridge translation renders consisten…

• Bestimmte Negation (Determined Negation)

  Bestimmte Negation — determined negation — is Hegel's signature account of the engine of dialectical movement. Its locus classicus is the Einleitung to the Wissenschaft der Logik at GW 21 raw 898 ("das Negative eben so sehr positiv ist, od…

• 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…

• Collection and Division (Diairesis)

  Plato's mature dialectical method, defined in the Phaedrus and deployed throughout the Sophist: collection (synagōgē) — "seeing together things that are scattered about everywhere and collecting them into one kind" so as to define — and di…

• Conquering Language (langage conquérant)

  Merleau-Ponty's name for speech that sets up a new signification within a "language machine [machine de langage] / apparatus [un appareil]" built from old signs — an apparatus that "sometimes gives more and sometimes less than what one put…

• Die absolute Idee (the absolute Idea)

  The absolute Idee is the closing category of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik and the system's self-reflective closure — the chapter (GW 12 pp. 236–253) where Hegel reads the entire WdL retroactively as the unfolding of the speculative metho…

• Die Sache selbst

  Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Preface is the philological source of die Sache selbst — "the matter itself" / "the crux of the matter" / "what is at stake" — as a methodological imperative within German philosophy. Pinkard preserve…

• Elenchus (Socratic Refutation)

  The elenchus (ἔλεγχος — "cross-examination," "testing," "refutation") is the question-and-answer procedure that gives Plato's early dialogues their shared form: Socrates elicits a confident definition from an interlocutor, draws out its co…

• 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…

• Epoché and the Transcendental Reduction

  Husserl's methodical operation of abstention (Greek ἐποχή, "suspension of judgment"): a deliberate putting-out-of-play of the natural belief in the world, which makes possible the transcendental reduction — the disclosure of the world pure…

• Expressivity (expressivité)

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the operation by which a phenomenon's internal arrangement indicates another phenomenon — at the perceptual register (the Thursday course 1953 definition: "the property that a phenomenon has through its internal ar…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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)

• 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…

• Hippias Minor (Lesser Hippias) Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Nicholas D. Smith, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Investigations into the Literary Use of Language Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Bryan Smyth), 1953

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; translated with introduction and notes by Bryan Smyth Year: 1953 (course delivered, January 19 – April 22); 2013 (French publication, ed. Zaccarello & Saint Aubert, Métis Presses); 2026 (English translatio…

• Involuntary Literature

  Merleau-Ponty's name for what Stendhal "stumbles into" in his Journal (1804–05) — the discovery, "spontaneously and almost unknowingly," of internal monologue as the technique that resolves the life-impasse of cynicism-vs-rapture. Not Roma…

• 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 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 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:

• 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…

• Maieutics (Socratic Midwifery)

  Socrates' image of his own philosophical method, given its one explicit statement in the Theaetetus (148e–151d): the art of the midwife (technē maieutikē). Socrates is himself "barren of wisdom" and "God forbids me to procreate"; his art i…

• 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…

• 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)

• Motivation

  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…

• 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 Attitude and Theoretical Attitude

  In the Crisis an attitude (Einstellung) is "a habitually fixed style of willing life" (Vienna Lecture). The natural attitude is straightforward, world-directed living — "To live is always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world" (§37); the theor…

• 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…

• Objective Thought

  Merleau-Ponty's cardinal methodological-and-ontological target in Phenomenology of Perception (1945): the stance that decomposes lived experience into determinate objects standing over against a constituting subject, then takes this produc…

• 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…

• 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…

• Philosophical Archeology

  Leonard Lawlor's (Ch 2 of Thinking through French Philosophy) genealogical reconstruction of archeology as a properly philosophical concept — not a methodological-historical one — with a six-characteristic pre-history in Freud (Dora; Civil…

• 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-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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Reflexion (Hegel)

  Hegel's Reflexion — the engine of the entire Doctrine of Essence — is not a subjective comparison-and-generalization activity (Kantian reflection) nor introspection (Cartesian-Lockean). It is an ontological structure of Wesen itself: "abso…

• Schritt zurück (the step back)

  Heidegger's name for the cardinal Bewegtheit-figure of the late-Heidegger Denken. Locus classicus: Protokoll zu einem Seminar über »Zeit und Sein« (1962) p. 38: "Der Schritt zurück tritt vor dem zurück, gewinnt Abstand zu dem, was erst ank…

• 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…

• 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…

• Socratic Definition (the 'What Is X?' Question)

  The demand, made canonical in the Euthyphro, for a definition by essence: not examples of X but "that form itself (eidos) by which all X-things are X," a single account usable "as a model" (paradeigma) to sort any case (6d–e). This ti esti…

• Statesman Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. C. J. Rowe, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Statesmanship (Politikē Technē)

  The royal or political art (politikē / basilikē technē) defined in Plato's Statesman: an expert knowledge of how to rule a city justly. The dialogue's distinctive thesis is that statecraft is architectonic and directive — it "does not itse…

• Task of Thinking (Aufgabe des Denkens)

  Heidegger's late name for post-philosophical thinking — a thinking that is neither metaphysics nor science, preparatory not founding (vorbereitend nicht stiftend), abseits ohne Effekt (apart, without effect), gleichwohl von eigener Notwend…

• Teleological-Historical Reflection

  The distinctive method of the Crisis, announced in the 1936 Preface: "by way of a teleological-historical reflection upon the origins of our critical scientific and philosophical situation, to establish the unavoidable necessity of a trans…

• The Mean (To Metrion / Due Measure)

  Plato's doctrine — sharpest in the Statesman (283c–285c) — that there are two arts of measurement: (a) measuring relative magnitude (greater and less, things measured against each other), and (b) measuring against the mean or due measure (…

• 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 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)

• 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 Ways of Being Young

  Merleau-Ponty's typology of philosophical disposition, articulated in the addendum to the preface of Signs (Signes, Gallimard 1960, pp. 34–35 — French pagination; in the ingested English McCleary edition the passage sits in the Introductio…

• 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…

• Vorstellung vs. Begriff

  Hegel's contrast between Vorstellung (representation / picture-thinking / "idea" in the loose sense) and Begriff (concept) marks the threshold between unscientific and scientific consciousness. The contrast runs throughout the Phenomenolog…

• Wahre Widerlegung (True Refutation, Hegel)

  Die wahre Widerlegung — true refutation — is Hegel's methodological doctrine that a philosophical system cannot be refuted from outside: it must be entered, recognized as a necessary standpoint, and shown to drive itself past itself. Locat…

• Zu den Sachen selbst (Back to the Things Themselves)

  Phenomenology's maxim, in its original habitat: the Introduction to the Logical Investigations (husserl-1900-logical-investigations-vol1, Inv. Intro §2): "Logical concepts, as valid thought-unities, must have their origin in intuition… we…

• 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…