Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity

ISBN-13: 9781137527431 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 313 str.

Anya Daly

Opis

This book draws on Merleau-Ponty s phenomenology, psychology, neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy to explicate Merleau-Ponty s unwritten ethics. Daly contends that though Merleau-Ponty never developed an ethics per se, there is significant textual evidence that clearly indicates he had the intention to do so. This book highlights the explicit references to ethics that he offers and proposes that these, allied to his ontological commitments, provide the basis for the development of an ethics.
In this work Daly shows how Merleau-Ponty s relational ontology, in which the interdependence of self, other and world is affirmed, offers an entirely new approach to ethics. In contrast to the top-down ethics of norms, obligations and prescriptions, Daly maintains that Merleau-Ponty s ethics is a bottom-up ethics which depends on direct insight into our own intersubjective natures, the I within the we and the we within the I; insight into the real nature of our relation to others and the particularities of the given situation.
Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity is an important contribution to the scholarship on the later Merleau-Ponty which will be of interest to graduate students and scholars. Daly offers informed readings of Merleau-Ponty s texts and the overall approach is both scholarly and innovative. "

Spis treści

Introduction

 

CHAPTER ONE: Alterity - The Trace of the Other

The Dilemma of Plurality

The argument from analogy

The uncertain apprehension of oneself

More certain of others: The body

More certain of others : Artefacts and Art

Merleau-Ponty and ‘Style’

More certain of others : Language

Conclusion: From Trace to Flesh                                                                                           

 

CHAPTER TWO: Alterity - The Reversibility Thesis and the Visible

What is the Reversibility Thesis?

Reversibility within the body’s sensibilities

Reversibility as it relates to external objects and world

The Visible

Vision and Movement

Reversibility and the Other

The body of the Other

The Self-Other distinction

Conclusion: The Flesh of the Visible

 

CHAPTER THREE: Alterity – The Reversibility Thesis and the Invisible

The Invisible: Reflection, Language, Expression and Culture<

The Reversibility of Reflection and Language

The Reversibility of Language and the World

Autochthonous Organization: The Logos of the World and Language

The Reversibility of Linguistic Subjects

Speech

Writing and Art – truth and style

Sartre’s Aesthetic Dualism

Malraux’s Aesthetic Dualism

Merleau-Ponty’s Style

Critique of Malraux’s Style

Merleau-Ponty’s Historicity: Historical alterity

The ‘Ultimate Truth’ – the reversibility of the Visible and the Invisible

Scientistic perversions versus artistic vision

Depth, Desire and Flesh

Conclusion: Chiasms within chiasms

 

CHAPTER FOUR: Objections to the Reversibility Thesis

Objections to the Reversibility Thesis I : Lefort

The asymmetry between the infant and the adult

The non-problem of asymmetry between subjects

The question of irreducibility – is a third term needed?

Lefort’s irreversibles and Merleau-Ponty’s ‘wild being’

Merleau-Ponty privileges vision over touch

Objections to the Reversibility Thesis II : Levinas

The compatibility of ontology and alterity

Epistemology beyond reflection

Sensation and Sentiment

Irreducibility

Conclusion: Irreducible alterities

 

CHAPTER FIVE: Intersubjectivity – Phenomenological, Psychological and Neuroscientific Intersections

Merleau-Ponty’s ambivalent regard for science

The Naturalist Turn in Phenomenology

The world out there vs the interworld

The embodied self: body schema and body image

Ownership and Agency

Self and Other: Theories of Mind and mirror neurons

Expressive subjects

Theory of Mind

The Interaction Theory of Social Cognition

Intersubjectivity

The Affective GPS

Conclusion: Beyond representationalist accounts of intersubjectivity

 

CHAPTER SIX: Primary Intersubjectivity: Affective Reversibility, Empathy and the Primordial ‘We’

Empathy and its vicissitudes

Merleau-Ponty and empathy

Zahavi on Empathy and Intersubjectivity

Primary Intersubjectivity: affective reversibility and the ‘primordial we’

Secondary Intersubjectivity and empathy

Tertiary intersubjectivity: empathy as ethical touchstone

Conclusion: an architectonic of empathy

 

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Social Matrix - Primary Empathy as the Ground of Ethics

Empathy and subjectivity

Scheler and fellow-feeling

Objections to the ‘empathy account of ethics’

Ethical failure and disembodiment

Conclusion: The ‘great bond’ versus the ‘inhuman gaze’.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Ethical Interworld

The Ethical Interworld

Rethinking facts and values

The amoralist’s challenge

Insight and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity

Conclusion: The Ethics of Intersubjectivity

                                                   

O autorze

Anya Daly completed a double-badged doctorate from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and l’Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, in December 2012. Her thesis, ‘The problem of the Other in the work of Merleau-Ponty: From Epistemology to Ethics’ explicated Merleau-Ponty’s implicit ethics from his accounts of embodiment, primordial percipience and his non-dual ontology.

Anya Daly spent five years in France researching and teaching across various disciplines in undergraduate, masters and doctoral programs, returning to Australia in 2010. Since then she has been based in Melbourne where she has taught on a number of the undergraduate programs in the Philosophy Department at the University of Melbourne.  Her research continues to be focused on the nexus phenomenology, neuroscience and psychology, specifically with regard to perception, destructiveness and ethical failure. Her additional research interests include creativity, aesthetics, the philosophy of psychiatry and Buddhist philosophy.