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.

Phenomenology’s remarkable insights are still largely overlooked when it comes to contemporary debate concerning values in general. This volume addresses this gap, bringing together papers on the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. What makes it special and distinct from similar texts, however, is its reliance on the axiological—that is, the ethical and existential—dimension of phenomenology’s account of intersubjectivity. All the great phenomenologists (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Levinas) are covered here, as are lesser-known thinkers in the Anglo-American world, such as Max Scheler and Gabriel Marcel. As such, this book will be welcomed by anyone with an interest in phenomenology, existential philosophy, continental philosophy, sociality, and values.

Challenging a prevalent Western idea of the self as a discrete, interior consciousness, Scott L. Marratto argues instead that subjectivity is a characteristic of the living, expressive movement establishing a dynamic intertwining between a sentient body and its environment. He draws on the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, contemporary European philosophy, and research in cognitive science and development to offer a compelling investigation into what it means to be a self.

A clear and comprehensive introduction to the thought of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Winner of the 2018 Edwin Ballard Prize awarded by the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology This book develops a unique phenomenology of plurality by introducing Hannah Arendt’s work into current debates taking place in the phenomenological tradition. Loidolt offers a systematic treatment of plurality that unites the fields of phenomenology, political theory, social ontology, and Arendt studies to offer new perspectives on key concepts such as intersubjectivity, selfhood, personhood, sociality, community, and conceptions of the "we." Phenomenology of Plurality is an in-depth, phenomenological analysis of Arendt that represents a viable third way between the "modernist" and "postmodernist" camps in Arendt scholarship. It also introduces a number of political and ethical insights that can be drawn from a phenomenology of plurality. This book will appeal to scholars interested in the topics of plurality and intersubjectivity within phenomenology, existentialism, political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy.

This book aims to clarify interdependence as a concept and to reveal the ontological commitments that demonstrate how this notion can help us address a range of contemporary issues in ethics, politics, environmental ethics, and interspecies concerns. The term interdependence is often mentioned in contemporary political and social discourses without a clear appreciation for its conceptual commitments and practical implications. Daly addresses these deficiencies through cogent analyses of phenomenology that interrogate and reconfigure our understandings of the various natural, interpersonal, cultural, and political domains key to our living in a shared world. The book's conceptual framework is organized around Merleau-Ponty's non-dualist and relational ontology, which underpins human subjects and other living beings in what he calls an "interworld." Each of the seven chapters outlines a different interworld--natural, perceptual, aesthetic, linguistic, philosophical, ethical, and political--and shows how phenomenology as a philosophy of lived experience is uniquely placed to reveal the significance and background conditions of that world. The book also engages with the commitments and methodologies of other disciplines, notably psychology, neuroscience, and political theory, to shed new light on the vexing issues contained within these interworlds.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein are two of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, yet their work is generally regarded as standing in contrast to one another. However, as this outstanding collection demonstrates they both reject a Cartesian picture of the mind and sought to offer an alternative that does justice to the role played by bodily action, language, and our membership within a community that shares a way of life. This is the first collection to compare and contrast the work of these two major philosophers. Fundamental topics and problems discussed include the role of community in their philosophies; Merleau-Ponty on description and depiction and Wittgenstein on saying and doing; the role of language; their treatment of expression; their relation to the philosophy of the Vienna Circle; solipsism; and rule-following. It is essential reading for anyone studying the work of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, as well as those interested in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.