Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity
Samenvatting
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.
Specificaties
Inhoudsopgave
<p> </p>
<p>CHAPTER ONE: Alterity - The Trace of the Other </p>
<p>The Dilemma of Plurality</p>
<p>The argument from analogy</p>
<p>The uncertain apprehension of oneself</p>
<p>More certain of others: The body</p>
<p>More certain of others : Artefacts and Art</p>
<p>Merleau-Ponty and ‘Style’</p>
<p>More certain of others : Language</p>
<p>Conclusion: From Trace to Flesh </p>
<p> </p>
<p>CHAPTER TWO: Alterity - The Reversibility Thesis and the Visible</p>
<p>What is the Reversibility Thesis? </p>
<p>Reversibility within the body’s sensibilities</p>
<p>Reversibility as it relates to external objects and world</p>
<p>The Visible</p>
<p>Vision and Movement</p>
<p>Reversibility and the Other</p>
<p>The body of the Other</p>
<p>The Self-Other distinction</p>
<p>Conclusion: The Flesh of the Visible</p>
<p> </p>
<p>CHAPTER THREE: Alterity – The Reversibility Thesis and the Invisible</p>
<p>The Invisible: Reflection, Language, Expression and Culture<</p>
<p>The Reversibility of Reflection and Language</p>
<p>The Reversibility of Language and the World</p>
<p>Autochthonous Organization: The Logos of the World and Language</p>
<p>The Reversibility of Linguistic Subjects</p>
<p>Speech</p>
<p>Writing and Art – truth and style</p>
<p>Sartre’s Aesthetic Dualism</p>
<p>Malraux’s Aesthetic Dualism</p>
<p>Merleau-Ponty’s Style</p>
<p>Critique of Malraux’s Style</p>
<p>Merleau-Ponty’s Historicity: Historical alterity</p>
<p>The ‘Ultimate Truth’ – the reversibility of the Visible and the Invisible</p>
<p>Scientistic perversions versus artistic vision</p>
<Metamorphosis in Vision</p>
<p>Depth, Desire and Flesh</p>
<p>Conclusion: Chiasms within chiasms</p>
<p> </p>
<p>CHAPTER FOUR: Objections to the Reversibility Thesis</p>
<p>Objections to the Reversibility Thesis I : Lefort</p>
<p>The asymmetry between the infant and the adult</p>
<p>The non-problem of asymmetry between subjects</p>
<p>The question of irreducibility – is a third term needed?</p>
<p>Lefort’s irreversibles and Merleau-Ponty’s ‘wild being’</p>
<p>Merleau-Ponty privileges vision over touch</p>
<p>Objections to the Reversibility Thesis II : Levinas</p>
<p>The compatibility of ontology and alterity</p>
<p>Epistemology beyond reflection</p>
<p>Sensation and Sentiment</p>
<p>Irreducibility</p>
<p>Conclusion: Irreducible alterities</p>
<p> </p>
<p>CHAPTER FIVE: Intersubjectivity – Phenomenological, Psychological and Neuroscientific Intersections</p> <p>Merleau-Ponty’s ambivalent regard for science</p>
<p>The Naturalist Turn in Phenomenology</p>
<p>The world out there vs the interworld</p>
<p>The embodied self: body schema and body image</p>
<p>Ownership and Agency</p>
<p>Self and Other: Theories of Mind and mirror neurons</p>
<p>Expressive subjects</p>
<p>Theory of Mind</p>
<p>The Interaction Theory of Social Cognition</p>
<p>Intersubjectivity</p>
<p>The Affective GPS</p>
<p>Conclusion: Beyond representationalist accounts of intersubjectivity</p>
<p> </p>
<p>CHAPTER SIX: Primary Intersubjectivity: Affective Reversibility, Empathy and the Primordial ‘We’</p>
<p>Empathy and its vicissitudes</p>
<p>Merleau-Ponty and empathy</p>
<p>Zahavi on Empathy and Intersubjectivity</p>
<p>Primary Intersubjectivity: affective reversibility and the ‘primordial we’</p>
<p>Secondary Intersubjectivity and empathy</p>
<p>Tertiary intersubjectivity: empathy as ethical touchstone</p>
<p>Conclusion: an architectonic of empathy</p>
<p> </p>
<p>CHAPTER SEVEN: The Social Matrix - Primary Empathy as the Ground of Ethics</p>
<p>Empathy and subjectivity</p>
<p>Scheler and fellow-feeling</p>
<p>Objections to the ‘empathy account of ethics’</p>
<p>Ethical failure and disembodiment</p>
<p>Conclusion: The ‘great bond’ versus the ‘inhuman gaze’.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>CHAPTER EIGHT: The Ethical Interworld</p>
<p>The Ethical Interworld</p>
<p>Rethinking facts and values</p>
<p>The amoralist’s challenge</p>
<p>Insight and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity</p>
<p>Conclusion: The Ethics of Intersubjectivity</p>
<p> </p>
