Browse — tag-problem-space

Tag: problem-space

Pages tagged with problem-space.

64 pages

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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"),…

• 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

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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, élan vital, et…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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 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 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…

• Three Orders of Signification (Physical / Vital / Human)

  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…

• 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…

• 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

• 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

• 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…