Description
Book SynopsisThis book explores a radically integrative phenomenology of nature through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By revisiting novel empirical findings in the sciences and advances in scientific methods and concepts, Merleau-Ponty leads us to rediscover a first nature right at the heart of the subject. Alessio Rotundo traces and documents the presence of a double meaning of nature affecting Merleau-Ponty’s analyses across foundational aspects of human experience: sense perception, organic development and behavior, cognition, language, and history. Physical, biological, and psychological processes in nature are not merely scientific data; they provide the evidence for another, more primordial sense of nature.
Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations Introduction: Stating the Problem 1 Preliminary Remarks 2 Historical Contextualization 3 Renewed Setting of the Problem 1 Natura Sub Specie Structurae 1 Science between Technocracy and Aesthetics 2 The Disinterested and the Interested Onlooker 3 Naturizing and Naturized Consciousness 4 Phenomenology between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty 2 Pathway to First Nature Operative Intentionality from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty 1 Introduction 2 Phenomenology as Redoing of Transcendental Philosophy 3 Cartesian “Realism” 4 The Genetic Turn in Phenomenology 5 Operative Intentionality 6 Brief Methodic Reflection on the “Idea of Being” in Phenomenology 7 The Prejudice of the World 8 Operative Intentionality as Temporalizing 9 The Project of the Phenomenology of Perception as Enquiry into Operative Intentionality 10 The Discovery of Contingency and Transcendental Philosophy: Descartes and Kant 11 The Body Schema: Phenomenology of Perception I 12 The Notion of Spatial Level: Phenomenology of Perception II 13 Merleau-Ponty and Kant on Space 3 Orders of Experience 1 Introduction: The Eidetic of Experience and Language 2 Approaches to Language 3 The Act of Speech 4 Language as Ontological Experience 5 Speaking of Fundamentals: The Promise of Language 6 Language and the Lifeworld: General Points from Phenomenology 7 The Problem of Einströmen 8 The Modal Ontology of the World 9 History in Lifeworld Phenomenology 4 Mundus Sensibilis Structural Ontology between Merleau-Ponty and the New Philosophy of Science 1 Introduction 2 Ontic Structural Realism 3 Syntactic and Semantic Views 4 Invariance between Physics and Phenomenology 5 Physics Deformalized 6 Observation and Objectivation 7 The Passage of Nature 8 Natural Dynamis between Physics and Perception 9 The Praxis of Nature, or What the Things Do 5 Nature and Logos 1 Introduction: Animal Nature 2 Biology and Ontology 3 Organic Totality 4 The Ontology of the Umwelt: Uexküll’s Notion of Umwelt 5 Behavior, Consciousness, and World 6 The Bivalent Ontology of the Umwelt 7 The Sphere of Life as Sphere of Intercorporeity 8 Towards a Philosophy in Double Dimensionality: Merleau-Ponty’s Esthesiology 6 The Institution of Nature 1 Introduction: Phenomenological Ontology and the Institution of Nature 2 Nature as Empirical and Transcendental Genesis 3 Towards Totality: Perceptual Faith and the Flesh 4 Tying It All Together: Nature as Leaf of Being Bibliographical References and Works Cited Index
