Browse — tag · philosophy-of-nature
Tag: philosophy-of-nature
Pages tagged with philosophy-of-nature.
40 pages
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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…
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Cautious Anthropomorphism
A strategic use of human predicates for non-human things in order to defamiliarise both terms — neither to make stones knowable like us, nor to flatten ontological difference into a uniform plane. The term enters the contemporary new-mater…
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Centralität (Centrality / Free Mechanism, Hegel)
Centralität (or Centralkörper / freier Mechanismus) is the absolute moment of Mechanism in the Objectivität-section of the Doctrine of the Concept (GW 12 pp. 143–146, with the cardinal political application at p. 152). The multiplicity of…
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Creation *ex nihilo* (Materialist, Nancy)
Nancy's redeployment of the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo as a materialist doctrine. It does not mean that the world is produced out of some pre-existing nothing by a powerful artisan-God; rather, it means the world has no presu…
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Creative Evolution
Author(s): Henri Bergson · Year: 1907 (trans. Donald A. Landes, Routledge 2023) · Type: book
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David Morris
Contemporary Merleau-Ponty scholar at Concordia University (Montreal). Co-editor with Kym Maclaren of Time, Memory, Institution: Merleau-Ponty's New Ontology of Self (Ohio University Press, 2015), one of the principal English-language volu…
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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…
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Freedom of the Stone (Nancy)
Nancy's claim — anchored at the end-fragment of The Experience of Freedom (EF 158–60) — that freedom extends not only to all living beings but also to the stone. The claim is intelligible only after a radical de-subjectivisation of freedom…
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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…
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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…
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Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
American scholar working at the intersection of medieval studies, ecocriticism, and philosophy of history; author of "Time Out of Memory" (in E. Scala and S. Federico, eds., The Post-Historical Middle Ages, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). The w…
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Knotenlinie (Nodal Line of Measure-Relations)
The Knotenlinie von Maßverhältnissen — nodal line of measure-relations — is Hegel's signature claim in the Maß-section of the Doctrine of Being (GW 21 raw ~5150–5300): quantitative changes accumulate continuously up to a node, at which a q…
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Maß (Measure, Hegel)
Maß (in GW 21's 1832 spelling, Maaß) is the third Abschnitt of the Doctrine of Being (GW 21 raw 4660–5571) — the categorial unity of Qualität and Quantität. A determinate quantum as qualifying — change it sufficiently and the qualitative d…
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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, dominant, and…
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Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy
Author(s): Emmanuel Alloa, Frank Chouraqui, Rajiv Kaushik (eds.) Year: 2019 Type: Edited volume (14 essays + epilogue), SUNY Press
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Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Sense and Being: At the Limits of Phenomenology
Author(s): Marie-Eve Morin · Year: 2022 · Type: book
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Merleau-Ponty and the Essence of Nature: A Return to Elemental Symbolism
Author(s): Taylor Knight Year: 2024 Type: Book (Edinburgh University Press, New Perspectives in Ontology series) Foreword: Emmanuel Falque
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Merleau-Ponty and the Order of the Earth
Author(s): Frank Chouraqui (University of Leiden) Year: 2016 Type: Paper (Research in Phenomenology 46, pp. 54-69)
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Merleau-Ponty: Institution-Ontology-Politics
Author(s): Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (ed.) Year: 2026 Type: edited volume (12 chapters + Introduction; 3 thematic Parts)
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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…
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Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1956–60)
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…
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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…
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Personalization / Depersonalization
Mounier's two-vector account of universal history in Personalism Ch I: history is constituted by the tension between personalization (the slow emergence of centres of indeterminacy out of matter's entropic monotony) and depersonalization (…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Quasi-Natural Signification
Merleau-Ponty's phrase at The Problem of Speech (PbP) p. 199, revisited in the third Nature course of 1959–60: an "order of quasi-natural significations" of language — the breakdown of the strict bifurcation between the natural sign (whose…
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Taylor Knight
Author of Merleau-Ponty and the Essence of Nature: A Return to Elemental Symbolism (Edinburgh University Press, New Perspectives in Ontology series, 2024; foreword by Emmanuel Falque) — the wiki's primary source for the elemental-ontology…
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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…
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The Anonymous Temporality of Animal Life: Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze on the Passive Syntheses of the Organic
Author(s): Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault Year: 2025 Type: paper (journal article, Continental Philosophy Review 58:445–467)
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The Birth of Sense: Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy
Author(s): Don Beith Year: 2018 Type: book (Ohio University Press, Series in Continental Thought No. 52)
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The Ideal Genesis of Matter (détente / inversion)
The metaphysical core of Creative Evolution Chapter III: Bergson's account of how intellectuality and materiality are engendered together from a higher "Consciousness in general," such that matter is the inversion-by-interruption of spirit…
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The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy
Author(s): Mauro Carbone Year: 2004 Type: book (commentary; collection of reworked essays)
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The Visible and the Invisible
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…
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Tim Ingold
British anthropologist (Professor Emeritus, University of Aberdeen), influential thinker on materials, perception, environment, and craft. Author of Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011 — BA) and many other work…
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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,…
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Wahlverwandschaft (Elective Affinity, Hegel)
Wahlverwandschaft — elective affinity — is the chemical sub-doctrine of reales Maaß in the Maß-section of the Doctrine of Being (GW 21 raw ~5050–5150). Hegel reads the Berthollet-Berzelius dispute on chemical affinity as a categorial dispu…
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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?
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Wild Being
Merleau-Ponty's name for the brute, uncultivated, pre-objective Being that is the project's positive object — the Being that "objective philosophy" (Husserl's term) has covered over and that the late ontology aims to bring to expression. "…
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Élan vital
Bergson's name (introduced in Creative Evolution, 1907) for the original impetus of life: a single creative current that "passes from one generation of germs to the next," dividing itself among the divergent lines of evolution "without the…