Browse — tag-method

Tag: method

Pages tagged with method.

47 pages

• 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

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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 (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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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 (1960, pp. 34–35) and used by Sartre in his 1961 manuscript-draft eulogy (sartre-1984-merleau-ponty-vivant) as the structural heuris…

• 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…

• 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…