Speaker Series: Merleau-Ponty, Nature and Logos

Abstract:

The exclusive, and often quite trite, emphasis on Merleau-Ponty’s thesis about the primacy of the perceiving body, sensible experience, and nature risks to obfuscate the truly central concern of Merleau-Ponty’s project, namely the problem regarding the very possibility of philosophical reflection – and together with this of the meaning of conceptual thinking, ideality, and spirit. Far from simply putting forward the ontological primacy of a “first nature” with respect to a “second nature,” or alternatively conceiving a “second nature” of which it is as important that is second as that it remain nature, Merleau-Ponty’s ambition is rather to renew the very inquiry into how we are to form and cast these concepts in the first place. Two interrelated points result from this project. The claim about the irreducibility of the embodied and situated dimension of knowledge, both as originative ground and explicandum, is coupled with the methodological point about just how to adequately describe the very structure of the origin that must function as explicans. In this presentation I explore this methodological point by especially drawing on Hegelian aspects in Merleau-Ponty’s thought.

Delivered in English.
All are welcome.