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Tag: philosophy

Pages tagged with philosophy.

59 pages

• A-Philosophy (Merleau-Ponty)

  Merleau-Ponty's radicalized formulation in the 1959 Collège course "The Possibility of Philosophy Today" (published 2022): "true philosophy mocks philosophy, is a-philosophy" (line 1507). A-philosophy — pronounced and written with the alph…

• A. J. Ayer

  British philosopher, the principal English-language exponent of logical positivism in the 1940s–60s. Author of Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) — the foundational English-language statement of Vienna-Circle positivism and verificationism.…

• 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…

• 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

• Alexandre Kojève

  Russian-born French philosopher, anthropologist of Hegel, the dominant figure of the French Hegel-Renaissance of the 1930s. Author of the Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Gallimard, 1947, ed. Raymond Queneau) — the published form of his…

• Being In and Toward the World

  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…

• Bernard Groethuysen

  German-French philosopher and historian of ideas (Berlin-trained, naturalized French 1937). Author of Origines de l'esprit bourgeois en France (Gallimard 1927) and Mythes et portraits (Gallimard 1947); long-time editor at the Nouvelle Revu…

• Bryan Smyth

  Contemporary Merleau-Ponty scholar and translator. Principal English translator of MP's Collège de France inaugural-year (1952–53) Monday and Thursday courses: The Sensible World and the World of Expression (Northwestern UP, 2020 — Thursda…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Georg Simmel

  Berlin philosopher and sociologist (1858–1918) whose late Lebensphilosophie — the doctrine that life produces autonomous strata that transcend life — supplies one of the cardinal twentieth-century structural-philosophical alternatives to B…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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 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…

• 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)

• 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…

• Jean Fourquet

  French linguist (1899–2001). Author of "La Notion de Verbe," Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique 43 (1) (1950): 72–96. The 1950 Fourquet paper is the textual anchor for Merleau-Ponty's critique of naïve linguistic universalism i…

• 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 Wahl

  French philosopher, the principal passeur of Hegel and Kierkegaard into French philosophy from the 1920s through the 1950s. Author of Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929) — the foundational French Hegel-commentar…

• Joseph Vendryes

  French linguist (1875–1960). Author of Le langage. Introduction linguistique à l'histoire (1921; English trans. Language. A Linguistic Introduction to History, trans. Paul Radin, Kegan Paul 1925). Merleau-Ponty cites Vendryes repeatedly ac…

• José Gaos

  Spanish-Mexican philosopher; Spanish Republican exile in Mexico from 1938; principal Spanish-language translator of Heidegger (the 1951 El ser y el tiempo — the first complete Castilian Sein und Zeit) and disciple of José Ortega y Gasset i…

• 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;…

• Leonard Lawlor

  American philosopher and translator; Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University (since 2008; formerly Faudree-Hardin University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, where he served from 1990–2008).…

• Luis Villoro

  Mexican philosopher, born in Barcelona to Spanish parents. Founder and de facto leader of the Hypérion philosophical group in Mexico City (autumn 1948–1953). Long-term professor at UNAM and the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas; lat…

• 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…

• 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 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)

• Michel Foucault

  French philosopher and historian of systems of thought. Author of Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (1961), Naissance de la clinique (1963), Raymond Roussel (1963), Les Mots et les choses (1966), L'Archéologie du sa…

• Nonphilosophy

  The organizing concept of Merleau-Ponty's 1959 course "The Possibility of Philosophy Today." Nonphilosophy designates not the absence or negation of philosophy but a dual condition: the destruction of classical philosophy (substance, subje…

• On Love (a fragment) Georg Simmel, 1984

  Author: Georg Simmel · Year: 1984 (translation; original German 1923, composition ca. 1907–1918) · Type: fragment

• 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…

• 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…

• Positive Philosophy

  Schelling's late project (formally announced in the Berlin lectures of the 1840s, culminating in the 1850 Quelle) of going beyond what he calls Vernunftwissenschaft — merely rational science — by recognizing that thought is indebted to bei…

• Possibility of Philosophy

  The problem-space organizing Merleau-Ponty's late thought (1959–61): given the diagnosed condition of nonphilosophy — the destruction of classical philosophy combined with the emergence of genuine philosophical insight in art, literature,…

• 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…

• Raymond Aron

  French philosopher, sociologist, political commentator. ENS condisciple of Sartre and MP (1924); agrégé 1928; doctorate 1938 with the Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire — the work MP critiques continuously from the Brussels 1946 l…

• Raymond Ruyer

  French philosopher (1902–1987), specialist in the philosophy of biology and animal behavior. In the wiki's context, Merleau-Ponty's primary source for the animal and embryological material in the 1954–55 Institution course. MP follows Ruye…

• 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…

• Seinsgeschichte

  Heidegger's concept of the "history of Being" — not a chronicle of philosophical doctrines but the successive ways in which Being itself "sends" (schickt) itself, concealing itself in the very act of disclosure. As read by Merleau-Ponty, 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)

• 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…

• 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)

• 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 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…

• Thought's Indebtedness to Being Sebastian Gardner, 2020

  Author(s): Sebastian Gardner (University College London) Year: 2020 (in G. Anthony Bruno, ed., Schelling's Philosophy: Freedom, Nature, and Systematicity, OUP; DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198812814.003.0012). Dated "2018" in the wiki slug because…

• 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…

• Trần Đức Thảo

  Vietnamese-French philosopher, phenomenologist, and marxist. Author of Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique (Minh-Tân, 1951; Gordon and Breach, 1985 trans.) — the principal work integrating Husserlian phenomenology with marxist mater…

• 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…

• Vincent Descombes

  French philosopher (b. 1943) working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and social philosophy. Major works include L'inconscient malgré lui (1977), Grammaire d'objets en tous genres (1983), Les institutions du sens (The Institu…

• 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…

• Éric Weil

  German-born French philosopher, naturalized 1938. Author of Logique de la philosophie (Vrin 1950) and Hegel et l'État (Vrin 1950) — both works on Hegel and post-Hegelian philosophy. Parallel reader of Hegel to MP in the late 1940s; lecture…