Browse — tag · problem-space

Tag: problem-space

Pages tagged with problem-space.

139 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Aftermath of the Absolute

  Malraux's structural-historical thesis (Part IV title and §V theme of The Voices of Silence): with the eclipse of religion as the West's organizing absolute, art itself has been promoted to the structural position the absolute occupies. Th…

• 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…

• Aletheia / Unverborgenheit

  The Greek ἀ-λήθεια (un-concealment), translated by Heidegger hartnäckig (stubbornly) as Unverborgenheit — not for etymology's sake but für die Sache, der bedacht werden muß. Heidegger's most concentrated late treatment of Aletheia is in "D…

• Anonymous Depth

  A late-Merleau-Ponty term for the dimensional register that is real for the subject but not an object of attention — a sister-concept of horizon, wild-being, and invisible of this world in the late ontology. The term surfaces explicitly in…

• 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…

• 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…

• Art as Revolt Against Fate

  Malraux's cardinal closing thesis in The Voices of Silence: "All art is a revolt against man's fate" (p. 671). Across all civilizations, art's deepest function is to defend man against destiny — the masterpiece "tells of a human victory ov…

• Augenblick

  The temporal-existential locus in which past and future converge in decision. Etymologically "blink-of-the-eye," the Augenblick is the moment of seeing-and-deciding — not a temporal point on a timeline but the Zeitlichkeit des Selbsthandel…

• 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…

• Brauch (late-Heidegger use/need of mortals by the Eignis)

  Heidegger's late-Heidegger term for the use / need that the Ereignis (the Eignis) exerts on the mortals, and that mortals owe to the Eignis. Locus classicus: Zeit und Sein (1962) marginalia (4) at p. 15 ("Brauchen"), (10) at p. 23 ("Brauch…

• 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"),…

• Carnal Cogito

  Saint Aubert's gloss on a Merleau-Ponty working-note formulation (November 1960): "Le « où suis-je ? » et « quelle heure est-il ? » de Claudel porte déjà la philosophie" — the carnal cogito. The phrase names MP's late re-positioning of the…

• 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

• 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…

• 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…

• Counter-Tradition

  Gary Brent Madison's thesis (Appendix II of his The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, 1981 — originally a 1977 Fredericton paper): there is a parallel philosophical tradition in Western thought distinct from the dominant rationalist Traditio…

• 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…

• Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens (1964) Martin Heidegger, 1964

  Author(s): Martin Heidegger Year: 1964 (this version: GA 14, 2007 — Klostermann edition with Heidegger's marginalia from his Handexemplar) Type: essay (originally Heidegger's contribution to the UNESCO Paris colloquium "Kierkegaard vivant,…

• End of Philosophy (das Ende der Philosophie)

  Heidegger's late thesis: philosophy as metaphysics — from Plato through Hegel-Husserl-Nietzsche-Marx — has ended in the present age. The end is Vollendung, not cessation: a Versammlung in die äußerste Möglichkeit (gathering into outermost…

• Engagement through Disengagement

  Merleau-Ponty's marginal phrase at L6 [80] of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953): "Engagement through disengagement. (the l'Académie Française episode)." Initially glossing Valéry's late acceptance of life (in particul…

• Erregender Zwiespalt zwischen Wahrheit und Kunst

  The "agitating discord" between art and truth at the heart of Nietzsche's late metaphysics. Nietzsche himself names it in 1888: "Über das Verhältnis der Kunst zur Wahrheit bin ich am frühesten ernst geworden: und noch jetzt stehe ich mit e…

• Es gibt (the late-Heidegger Sprachgebrauch-shift)

  Heidegger's cardinal late-Heidegger Sprachgebrauch-shift: from "Sein ist / Zeit ist" to "Es gibt Sein / Es gibt Zeit." The shift is the gate to thinking Sein ohne das Seiende — Sein "without recourse to grounding from beings." Locus classi…

• Eugen Fink

  German phenomenologist (1905–1975), Husserl's research assistant at Freiburg from 1928 to Husserl's death in 1938; principal interpreter and developer of Husserl's late transcendental phenomenology; co-author of Husserl's Sixth Cartesian M…

• 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…

• Exscription

  Nancy's neologism (ex-scription, l'exscrit) for the writing-out of the body that exceeds inscription — the moment in writing where what is written exceeds writing itself, where sense exscribes the body that writing claims to inscribe. The…

• 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…

• Fragile Skin of the World

  The title-figure of Nancy's last book (The Fragile Skin of the World, 2020/2021). The world is neither animal (Stoic immanent finality) nor machine (Enlightenment external causality) but us; it has no skin of its own and is "the factorial…

• G. W. F. Hegel

  German philosopher (1770–1831). Author of the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; ingested as hegel-1807-phenomenology-spirit), the Wissenschaft der Logik (1812-16, with the Doctrine of Being revised 1831-32; all three volumes now ingested —…

• Gestural Expression

  Merleau-Ponty's Sorbonne-period doctrine (chapter 8 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 1951–52) of the body as the medium of intersubjectivity through gesture: "the body inhabited by meaning"; "to perceive the other is to decipher a languag…

• Haptical Différance

  Derrida's positive thesis (named at On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy p. 240) for the spacing, interruption, interposition, detour constitutive of any contact. Against the haptocentric tradition's thesis of immediate self-touch, Derrida argues th…

• Haptico-Transcendental Reduction

  Derrida's diagnostic name (in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy §13) for the risk — visible most clearly in Nancy's own Corpus and Une pensée finie — of reducing sense to touch as the transcendental of all sense. The Nancean formula "Sense IS tou…

• Haptocentrism

  Haptocentrism is Derrida's diagnostic name (coined in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 2000, p. 52) for the philosophical tradition that privileges touch (Greek haphē) as the sense of immediacy, contact, presence, and self-relation — making tou…

• 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…

• Hermeneutics (Philosophical)

  Hermeneutics is the theory of understanding and interpretation. In Gadamer's Truth and Method it is decisively transformed: from an art or technique of correct interpretation (the older theological, legal, and philological hermeneutics; Sc…

• 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…

• Homoclite / Heteroclite

  Foucault's terms — in Les Mots et les choses (MC 9/xvii) and Le souci de soi — generalized by Leonard Lawlor (Ch 2 of Thinking through French Philosophy) into a spatialization-of-time apparatus that maps the diffraction between Merleau-Pon…

• Horizon (Phenomenological)

  The Husserlian phenomenological structure by which any determinate object is given against an indeterminate-but-co-present background that conditions its perceptual sense, taken up and transformed in Merleau-Ponty's late ontology as the di…

• How can two terms be one inside the other without fusing or separating?

  Standing answer: Merleau-Ponty does not solve this; he dissolves it. The fuse-or-separate dilemma has force only if one concedes that there are two demarcated terms first, which must then be either joined or held apart. MP denies the premi…

• 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

• Identität und Differenz (GA 11) Martin Heidegger, 2006

  Author: Martin Heidegger · Year: 2006 (GA edition; texts 1949–1963) · Editor: Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann · Type: book (Sammelband)

• 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…

• Imposture (three-fold, MP's reading of Valéry)

  Merleau-Ponty's name (drawn from Valéry but systematized) for the three constitutive deceptions of literary writing diagnosed in lectures 4–5 of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953): (1) the writer is mastered by what hi…

• 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…

• Indirect or Objective Lyricism

  Ramon Fernandez's term, enthusiastically endorsed by Merleau-Ponty in the 1953 Collège course The Literary Use of Language (Lecture 14): "a way of arousing emotion which involves showing facts, things, without saying their effect." Three e…

• 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…

• Innere Sprachform

  Wilhelm von Humboldt's German technical term — innere Sprachform, "inner form of language" — taken up by Merleau-Ponty via Kurt Goldstein's Language and Language Disturbances (1948) as a name for the global articulating structure of a lang…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Investment as Civilizational Principle (Nancy)

  Nancy's late diagnosis of the Western civilizational sequence — Roman enterprise → Christian transfer-and-galvanization → bourgeois investment → present automation — as the systematic development of a single principle: investment. From Lat…

• 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…

• Kehre (the Turn)

  The Kehre names a structural reversal internal to the Sachverhalt of Sein und Zeit / Zeit und Sein — not a biographical change of standpoint in Heidegger's thinking but the turning within Being itself whereby the Vergessenheit (forgetfulne…

• Kurt Goldstein

  German-American neurologist and psychiatrist (1878-1965). One of the cardinal scientific sources of Merleau-Ponty's philosophical work, cited extensively from The Structure of Behavior (1942) onward. Goldstein's clinical work on aphasia, h…

• Law of Tact

  Derrida's name (in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy §4, p. 77) for the quasi-transcendental commandment to touch without touching, prior to any religion, culture, or ritual abstinence. The law of tact is "the law itself, the law of the law": "on…

• Le problème de la parole. Cours au Collège de France, Notes, 1953-1954 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 2020

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: Course delivered 3 December 1953 – April 1954; manuscript published 2020 (MétisPresses, Genève) Type: lecture-course (Collège de France preparatory notes) Citation scheme: BNF foliotage [N] followed b…

• Leitfrage and Grundfrage

  Heidegger's architectonic distinction between two questions of philosophy. The Leitfrage (guiding question) is "Was ist das Seiende?" — "What is the being?" — i.e., what makes a being a being? This question, given its decisive form by Aris…

• Lichtung

  Heidegger's late name for the Offenheit (openness) — the free open — that grants any Scheinen (showing), any Zeigen (appearing), and any An- und Abwesendes (presencing or absence). Locus classicus: "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe…

• 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…

• 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…

• Maine de Biran

  French philosopher (1766–1824) of the body's motor-evidence and of the fait primitif. Author of the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie et sur ses rapports avec l'étude de la nature. Per Saint Aubert (2006 Ch II §2), Biran is a card…

• Maurice Blondel

  French Catholic philosopher (1861–1949), author of L'Action (1893) and L'Être et les êtres. Essai d'ontologie concrète et intégrale (1935). Per Saint Aubert (2006 Ch III §2b), Blondel is the cardinal genealogical source for Merleau-Ponty's…

• 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…

• Mediated Unity vs. Immediate Duality

  Leonard Lawlor's most precise structural formula for the Derrida–Deleuze diffraction (Ch 8 §§II–III of Thinking through French Philosophy, summer 2001). Mediated unity (Derrida): two sides of any opposition (presence/non-presence, expressi…

• 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 and Nancy on Sense and Being: At the Limits of Phenomenology Marie-Eve Morin, 2022

  Author(s): Marie-Eve Morin · Year: 2022 · Type: book

• Mondialisation of Flesh

  Derrida's name (at On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy p. 247) for the over-extension of Husserlian Leiblichkeit — the globalization (mondialisation) of chair / flesh — beyond the self-affecting body to "things," "essences," and modes of experience…

• Mutual Implication as Ontological Starting Structure

  The problem-space named by the question: how can two terms — self and world, visible and invisible, animal and human, past and present, philosopher and philosophy — be one inside the other without either fusing into undifferentiated identi…

• Mythical Time

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the past that has never been present — a temporal register beyond the chronological-presentist horizon, anchored in the April 1960 V&I working note "Indestructible Past" ("architectonic past… mythical time, time be…

• 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…

• 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…

• On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy Jacques Derrida, 2005

  Author(s): Jacques Derrida · Year: 2005 (orig. Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Galilée 2000; v1 essay "Le toucher: Touch/To Touch Him" in Paragraph 16:2, 1993, trans. Peggy Kamuf) · Type: book

• Onto-Theo-Logik (Onto-Theo-Logic)

  The onto-theo-logical constitution (onto-theo-logische Verfassung) names the inner structural form of all metaphysics: because Being shows itself as Grund (ground), metaphysics is simultaneously Onto-logik (grounding beings in general as S…

• 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…

• 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…

• Partage (Nancy)

  Nancy's untranslatable French term partage — simultaneously sharing out, apportioning, parting, partitioning, partaking — names the structure of "participation as much as irreducible partition" (Nancy, glossed by Derrida in On Touching—Jea…

• 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…

• 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…

• Personalism Emmanuel Mounier, 1952

  Author: Emmanuel Mounier · Year: 1950 (French; English trans. Mairet 1952) · Type: book

• Personalism

  Mounier's synthesizing term for the mid-twentieth-century philosophical-political movement that affirms the person (la personne) — neither a thing nor a definition but "the one reality that we know, and that we are at the same time fashion…

• Phenomenology of Spirit Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 2018

  Author(s): Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) Year: 1807 (original); 2018 (Pinkard trans., Cambridge Hegel Translations) Type: book (Hegel's first published system; originally subtitled System der Wissenschaft. Erster Theil. Die Phä…

• 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 Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected Therewith F. W. J. Schelling, 1809

  Author: F. W. J. Schelling · Year: 1809 (Love & Schmidt translation 2006, SUNY Press) · Type: Book (treatise plus appended Supplementary Texts)

• 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…

• 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…

• Point of Diffraction

  Leonard Lawlor's central neologism (borrowed from Foucault AS 87/65 but recoded): the productive lack that generates a system of philosophical options when a generation of thinkers attempts to solve the same problem. For Lawlor the point o…

• 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,…

• 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…

• Protokoll zu einem Seminar über den Vortrag »Zeit und Sein« (1962) Martin Heidegger, Alfredo Guzzoni, 1962

  Author(s): Martin Heidegger and Alfredo Guzzoni (the Protokoll was written by Guzzoni; Heidegger reviewed and supplemented it: "Der Text wurde von mir überprüft und an einigen Stellen ergänzt") Year: 1962 (Todtnauberg, Schwarzwald, 11–13 S…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• Se toucher toi (To Self-Touch You)

  Nancy's grammatical-philosophical figure (from Corpus p. 36) for the constitutive failure of pure self-touch — and one of Derrida's master-concepts in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Part III, §§12–13). The French phrase se toucher toi — "to s…

• Seinsfrage

  Heidegger's "question of Being" — the cardinal question of Sein und Zeit and the rubric under which Heidegger's lifelong project travels. The 1964 essay "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" marginal (27) reframes the Seinsfrage…

• Singular-Plural (Nancy)

  Nancy's lifelong concept, named in his 1996 book Être singulier pluriel (Being Singular Plural) and re-deployed in late synthesis in Fragile Skin of the World VIII: the structural co-implication of singular and plural at the ontological le…

• 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…

• Stendhal (Henri Beyle)

  French novelist (1783–1842), born Henri-Marie Beyle in Grenoble; principal pseudonym "Stendhal" (after the German town Stendal); reputed to have used over 200 pseudonyms (César Bombet, Jules de Saint-Bertrand, etc.). Author of Le Rouge et…

• Syncope (Nancy)

  Nancy's figure (developed across Le discours de la syncope: Logodaedalus (1976), Ego sum (1979), Corpus (1992), Une pensée finie (1990)) for the interruption-at-the-heart-of-contact — the rhythmic break, the cut, the gap, the diastolic/sys…

• 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…

• Techject / Ecotechnics (Nancy)

  Nancy's late philosophy-of-technology operates with two distinct-but-coordinated terms: techject (II §3 e raw 559) — neither object nor subject, the agent of intrinsically-technical relations — and ecotechnics (II §3 d raw 549) — the regim…

• Technē of Bodies

  Nancy's phrase (from Corpus and L'intrus, both 2000) for the technical-prosthetic-supplementary structure of any body — the technē (Greek technē: art, craft, skill, technics) that constitutes the body rather than supervening upon it. The p…

• 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 Fragile Skin of the World Jean-Luc Nancy, 2021

  Author(s): Jean-Luc Nancy · Year: 2021 (French 2020) · Type: book

• The Hand of God

  The theologized organ that, on Derrida's reading in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (esp. §§7, 11), haunts the haptocentric tradition of touch. The figure runs from the biblical hand of God (Genesis, Exodus, the Psalms) through Aquinas's mutuus…

• The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the Limits of Consciousness Gary Brent Madison, 1981

  Author(s): Gary Brent Madison · Year: 1981 (English self-translation of La phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty, Klincksieck 1973) · Type: book (~340 pp.)

• 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 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 Vicious Circle as a Selective Doctrine

  The longest and most politically charged chapter of Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle reads the Eternal Return not only as a lived experience but as a selective doctrine — "a means of training and selection" (Nietzsche's…

• Theodicy

  The philosophical project of justifying God's permission of evil in creation — coined by Leibniz in his 1710 Essais de théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal. The Love & Schmidt editors' Introduction to t…

• Thinking through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question Leonard Lawlor, 2003

  Author: Leonard Lawlor (University of Memphis, Department of Philosophy) · Year: 2003 · Type: book (collected essays, revised; Indiana University Press, Studies in Continental Thought series)

• Three Orders of Signification

  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…

• Touching the Untouchable

  The structural figure — running from Aristotle's De Anima 424a (haptou kai anaptou: "touch has for its object both what is tangible and what is intangible") through the entire philosophical tradition of touch — that the object of touch is…

• Tragic Optimism

  Mounier's signature coinage at Personalism Ch I p. 16: "Between the impatient optimism of liberal and revolutionary illusion, and the impatient pessimism of the fascists, the right road for man is in this tragic optimism, where he finds hi…

• 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,…

• 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…

• Truth is Poetry (le vrai est poésie)

  Merleau-Ponty's organizing thesis for the fourteenth lecture of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953): "The truth is in essence poetic, [it] is found only in fiction, – which is not unreal or arbitrary" (L11 [118]). With…

• 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…

• 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

• Vertical Being

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the irrelative source of transcendence in his late ontology — the "from-above" (Hoheit) that is not a relativity of subject or object but their common source. The cardinal phrase is "All verticality comes from vert…

• 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…

• 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

• Wissenschaft der Logik, Erster Band: Die Objective Logik (1812/1813) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1813

  Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · Year: 1812/1813 · Type: book

• Wissenschaft der Logik, Erster Theil: Die Lehre vom Sein (1832 revision) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1832

  Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · Year: 1832 · Type: book

• Wissenschaft der Logik, Zweiter Band: Die Subjective Logik oder Lehre vom Begriff (1816) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1816

  Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · Year: 1816 · Type: book

• Writing and Living

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the relation between the writer's vocation and the writer's life, and for the quadruple-negation thesis through which the relation is articulated: writing is neither end nor means, neither cause nor effect of life…

• Zeit und Sein (1962) Martin Heidegger, 1962

  Author(s): Martin Heidegger Year: 1962 (Vortrag 31 January 1962, Studium Generale Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Eugen Fink leitung, "im überfüllten Auditorium maximum"; first print: Festschrift für Jean Beaufret L'endurance de la pe…

• Être humain est un parti / To Be Human Is Also to Take a Side

  Stendhal's phrase from the Lucien Leuwen marginalia, picked up by Merleau-Ponty as the closing political-philosophical thesis of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953). The thesis: the writer's engagement is intrinsic to t…

• Œuvres II (Pléiade) Paul Valéry, 1960

  Author(s): Paul Valéry (1871–1945) Year: 1960 (Pléiade composite; constituent works span 1894–1946) Type: book (Pléiade composite volume of dialogues, Cahier recueils, prose pieces, and essays) Editor: Jean Hytier Edition: Bibliothèque de…