Phenomenology of Perception

Name: Phenomenology of Perception
Price: 4390 ISK
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Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
ISBN: 9781135718671

Höfundur: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Útgáfa: 1)

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First published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s monumental Phénoménologie de la perception signalled the arrival of a major new philosophical and intellectual voice in post-war Europe. Breaking with the prevailing picture of existentialism and phenomenology at the time, it has become one of the landmark works of twentieth-century thought. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers.

Phenomenology of Perception stands in the great phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is decisive, as he brings this tradition and other philosophical predecessors, particularly Descartes and Kant, to confront a neglected dimension of our experience: the lived body and the phenomenal world. Charting a bold course between the reductionism of science on the one hand and "intellectualism" on the other, Merleau-Ponty argues that we should regard the body not as a mere biological or physical unit, but as the body which structures one’s situation and experience within the world.

Merleau-Ponty enriches his classic work with engaging studies of famous cases in the history of psychology and neurology as well as phenomena that continue to draw our attention, such as phantom limb syndrome, synaesthesia, and hallucination. This new translation includes many helpful features such as the reintroduction of Merleau-Ponty’s discursive Table of Contents as subtitles into the body of the text, a comprehensive Translator’s Introduction to its main themes, essential notes explaining key terms of translation, an extensive Index, and an important updating of Merleau-Ponty’s references to now available English translations.

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Útgefandi: Taylor & Francis

ISBN: 9781135718671

Print ISBN: 9780415558693

Format: ePub

Útgáfa: 1

Höfundar: Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Tungumál: English

Útgefið: 2013-04-15

Prent takmörkun á líftíma: 100

Prent takmörkun: 2

Afritunar takmörkun: 2

Flokkar: Heimspeki Sálfræði

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Cover Page
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Foreword
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Translator’s Introduction
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Classical Prejudices and the Return to Phenomena
I “Sensation”
a. Sensation as impression.
b. Sensation as quality.
c. Sensation as the immediate consequence of a stimulation.
d. What is sensing?
II “Association” and the “Projection of Memories”
a. If I have sensations, then all experience is sensation.
b. The segregation of the field.
c. There is no “associative force.”
d. There is no “projection of memories.”
e. Empiricism and reflection.
III “Attention” and “Judgment”
a. Attention and the unquestioned belief in the world in itself.
b. Judgment and reflective analysis.
c. Reflective analysis and phenomenological reflection.
d. “Motivation.”
IV The Phenomenal Field
a. The phenomenal field and science.
b. Phenomena and “facts of consciousness.”
c. Phenomenal field and transcendental philosophy.
Part One: The Body
[Introduction to Part One]
a. Experience and objective thought.
b. The problem of the body.
I The Body as an Object and Mechanistic Physiology
a. Neural physiology itself goes beyond causal thought.
b. The phenomenon of the phantom limb: physiological and psychological explanations are equally insufficient.
c. Existence between the “psychical” and the “physiological.”
d. Ambiguity of the phantom limb.
e. “Organic repression” and the body as an innate complex.
II The Experience of the Body and Classical Psychology
a. The “permanence” of one’s own body.
b. “Double sensations.”
c. The body as an affective object.
d. “Kinesthetic sensations.”
e. Psychology necessarily leads back to phenomena.
III The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motricity
a. Spatiality of position and spatiality of situation: the body schema.
b. The analysis of motricity in Gelb and Goldstein’s study of Schneider.
c. “Concrete movement.”
d. Movement toward the possible, “abstract movement.”
e. Motor project and motor intentionality.
f. The “function of projection.”
g. (i) These phenomena are impossible to understand through a causal explanation and by connecting them to a visual deficiency ...
g. (ii) ... or through a reflective analysis and by connecting them to the “symbolic function.”
h. The existential ground of the “symbolic function” and the structure of illness.
i. Existential analysis of “perceptual disorders” and “intellectual disorders.”
j. The “intentional arc.”
k. The intentionality of the body.
l. The body is not in space, it inhabits space.
m. Habit as the motor acquisition of a new signification.
IV The Synthesis of One’s Own Body
a. Spatiality and corporeality.
b. The unity of the body and the unity of the work of art.
c. Perceptual habit as the acquisition of a world.
V The Body as a Sexed Being
a. Sexuality is not a mixture of “representations” and reflexes, but an intentionality.
b. Being in a sexual situation.
c. Psychoanalysis.
d. An existential psychoanalysis is not a return to“spiritualism.”
e. In what sense does sexuality express existence? By accomplishing it.
f. The sexual “drama” does not reduce to the metaphysical“drama”; rather, sexuality is metaphysical.
g. Sexuality cannot be “transcended.”
Note on the existential interpretation of dialectical materialism.
VI The Body as Expression, and Speech
a. Empiricism and intellectualism in the theory of aphasia, equally insufficient.
b. Language has a sense.
c. Language does not presuppose thought, it accomplishes thought.
d. Thought in words.
e. Thought is expression.
f. The understanding of gestures.
g. The linguistic gesture.
h. There are neither any natural signs nor any purely conventional signs.
i. Transcendence in language.
j. Confirmation through the modern theory of aphasia.
k. The miracle of expression in language and in the world.
The body and Cartesian analysis.2
Part Two: The Perceived World
[Introduction to Part Two]
The theory of the body is already a theory of perception.
I Sensing
a. Who is the subject of perception?
b. Relations between sensing and behaviors: quality as the concretion of a mode of existence; sensing as coexistence.
c. Consciousness ensnared in the sensible.
d. Generality and particularity of the “senses.”
e. The senses are “fields.”
f. The plurality of the senses. How intellectualism transcends this plurality and how it is justified against empiricism.
g. How reflective analysis nevertheless remains abstract.
h. The a priori and the empirical.
i. Each sense has its “world.”
j. Communication of the senses.
k. Sensing “prior to” the senses.
l. Cases of synesthesia.
m. The senses are distinct and yet indiscernible, like monocular images in binocular vision.
n. Unity of the senses through the body.
o. The body as a general system of symbols for the world.
p. Man is a sensorium commune.
q. The perceptual synthesis is temporal.
r. To reflect is to recover the unreflected.
II Space
[Introduction] Is space a “form” of knowledge?
A. Up and Down.
i. Orientation is not given with the “content.”
ii. But neither is orientation constituted by the activity of the mind.
iii. The spatial level, anchorage points, and existential space.
iv. Being has sense only through its orientation.
B. Depth.
i. Depth and breadth.
ii. The alleged signs of depth are in fact motives.
iii. Analysis of apparent size.
iv. Illusions are not constructions, the sense of the perceived is motivated.
v. Depth and the “transition synthesis.”
vi. Depth is a relation from me to things.
vii. The same goes for height and breadth.
C. Movement.
i. Thinking about movement destroys movement.
ii. The psychologists’ description of movement.
iii. But what does this description mean?
iv. The phenomenon of movement, or movement prior to thematization.
v. Movement and the thing moving.
vi. The “relativity” of movement.
D. Lived Space.
i. The experience of spatiality expresses our being firmly set within the world.
ii. The spatiality of the night.
iii. Sexual space.
iv. Mythical space.
v. Lived space.
vi. Do these spaces presuppose geometrical space?
vii. These spaces must be recognized as original.
viii. They are nevertheless constructed upon a natural space.
ix. The ambiguity of consciousness.
III The Thing and the Natural World
A. Perceptual Constants.
i. Constancy of form and of size.
ii. Constancy of color: the “modes of appearance” of color and lighting.
iii. Constancy of sounds, temperatures, and weights.
iv. The constancy of tactile experiences and movement.
B. The Thing or the Real.
i. The thing as norm of perception.
ii. The existential unity of the thing.
iii. The thing is not necessarily an object.
iv. The real as the identity of all the givens among themselves, as the identity of the givens and their sense.
v. The thing “prior to” man.
vi. The thing beyond anthropological predicates because I am in the world.
C. The Natural World.
i. The world as schema. As a style. As an individual.
ii. The world appears perspectivally, but is not posited by a synthesis of understanding.
iii. Transition synthesis.
iv. Reality and incompleteness of the world: the world is open.
v. The world as the nucleus of time.
D. Verification through the Analysis of Hallucination.
i. Hallucination is incomprehensible for objective thought.
ii. Return to the hallucinatory phenomenon.
iii. The hallucinatory thing and the perceived thing.
iv. Both the hallucinatory thing and the perceived thing are born from a function deeper than knowledge.
v. “Originary opinion.”
IV Others and the Human World
a. Intertwining of natural time and historical time.
b. How do personal acts become sedimented?
c. How are others possible?
d. Coexistence made possible by the discovery of perceptual consciousness.
e. Coexistence of psycho-physical subjects in a natural world and of men in a cultural world.
f. But is there a coexistence of freedoms and of I’s?
g. The permanent truth of solipsism.
h. Solipsism cannot be overcome “in God.”
i. But solitude and communication are two sides of the same phenomenon.
j. Absolute subject and engaged subject, and birth.
k. Suspended, not interrupted, communication.
l. The social, not as an object, but rather as a dimension of my being.
m. The social event on the outside and on the inside.
n. The problems of transcendence.
o. The true transcendental is the Ur-Sprung [springing-forth] of transcendences.
PART THREE: BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD
I The Cogito
a. Interpretation of the cogito in terms of eternity.
b. Consequences: the impossibility of finitude and of others.
c. Return to the cogito.
d. The cogito and perception.
e. The cogito and affective intentionality.
f. False or illusory feelings. Feeling as engagement.
g. I know that I think because first I think.
h. The cogito and the idea: geometrical idea and perceptual consciousness.
i. Idea and speech, the expressed in the expression.
j. The non-temporal is the acquired.
k. Evidentness, like perception, is a fact.
l. Apodictic evidentness and historical evidentness.
m. Against psychologism and skepticism.
n. The dependent and indeclinable subject.
o. Tacit cogito and spoken cogito.
p. Consciousness does not constitute language, it takes it up.
q. The subject as a project of the world, a field, temporality, and the cohesion of a life.
II Temporality
a. There is no time in things.
b. Nor is time to be found in “states of consciousness.”
c. Ideality of time? Time is a relation of being.
d. The “field of presence,” the horizons of past and future.
e. Operative intentionality.
f. Cohesion of time through the very passage of time.
g. Time as subject and subject as time.
h. Constituting time, and eternity.
i. Ultimate consciousness is presence in the world.
j. Temporality [as] self-affection of itself.
k. Passivity and activity.
l. The world as the place of significations.
m. Presence in the world.
III Freedom
a. Total freedom or none at all.
b. Then there is no such thing as action, choice, or “doing.”
c. Who gives the motives a sense?
d. Implicit valuation of the sensible world.
e. Sedimentation of being in the world.
f. Valuation of historical situations: class prior to class consciousness.
g. Intellectual project and existential project.
h. The For-Itself and the For-Others, intersubjectivity.
i. There is some sense to history.
j. The Ego and its halo of generality.
k. The absolute flow is for itself a consciousness.
l. I do not choose myself starting from nothing.
m. Conditioned freedom.
n. Provisional synthesis of the in-itself and the for-itself in presence.
o. My signification is outside of myself.
Bibliography