Diabetes, Chronic Illness and the Bodily Roots of Ecstatic Temporality
Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences (2008), 31 (4). pp. 399-421.
This article studies the phenomenology of chronic illness in light of phenomenology’s insights into ecstatic temporality and freedom. It shows how a chronic illness can, in lived experience, manifest itself as a disturbance of our usual relation to ecstatic temporality and thence as a disturbance of freedom. This suggests that ecstatic temporality is related to another sort of time—“provisional time”—that is in turn rooted in the body. The article draws on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Heidegger’s Being and Time, shedding light on the latter’s concept of ecstatic temporality. It also discusses implications for self-management of chronic illness, especially in children.
Liked (2) Reversibility and Ereignis: Being as Kantian Imagination in Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger
Philosophy Today 52 (2008), Supplement 2008, Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy: 135-143
This paper aims to clarify to Merleau-Ponty’s difficult concept of “reversibility” by interpreting it as resuming the dialectical critique of the rationalist and empiricist tradition that informs Merleau-Ponty’s earlier work. The focus is on reversibility in “Eye
and Mind,” as dismantling the traditional dualism of activity and passivity. This also puts reversibility in continuity with the Phenomenology’s appropriation of Kant, letting us note an affiliation between Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility and Heidegger’s Ereignis: in each case being itself already performs the operation that Kant had located in the imagination. Reversibility discovers this Kantian imagination moving in place, Ereignis discovers it in temporality.
and Mind,” as dismantling the traditional dualism of activity and passivity. This also puts reversibility in continuity with the Phenomenology’s appropriation of Kant, letting us note an affiliation between Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility and Heidegger’s Ereignis: in each case being itself already performs the operation that Kant had located in the imagination. Reversibility discovers this Kantian imagination moving in place, Ereignis discovers it in temporality.
The Time and Place of the Organism: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy in Embryo
Alter: Revue de phénoménologie 16 (2008): 69-86
In Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, eds. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen Publishing, 2008), 111-120
Faces and the Invisible of the Visible: Toward an Animal Ontology
PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (2007), 2 (2). pp. 124-169.
This paper studies the role of faces in animal life to gain insight into Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, especially his later ontology. The relation between animal faces and moving, animal bodies involves a peculiar, expressive logic. This logic echoes the physiognomic structure of perception that Merleau-Ponty detects in his earlier philosophy, and exemplifies and clarifies a logic elemental to his later ontology, especially to his concept of an invisible that is of (endogenous to) the visible. The question why the logic of the face can manifest this analogy or homology with the logic of perception and ontology is treated through a study of embryology, which suggests that the logic of the face ramifies a deeper logic of being. Methodologically, the face is taken as something like a lens into the onto-logic of being. This lens suggests that what underlies Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology is a logic of animality.
Phenomenological Realism and the Moving Image of Experience
invited critical response to Andrew Bailey, “Spatial Perception, Embodiment and Scientific Realism: Critical notice of David Morris, The Sense of Space (SUNY 2004),” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 46 (2007): 569-582
Philosophy of Mind
In The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies, ed. Constantin Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press/Columbia University Press, 2007), 531-544
This discusses "Continental Philosophy of Mind."
Ecstatic Body, Ecstatic Nature: Perception as Breaking With the World
Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought (2006). Science and Philosophy (8). VRIN/Mimesis/University of Memphis, pp. 201-217
I survey some unusual phenomena in which the body seems to be projected into other things. I argue that these phenomena should not be understood as illusions, as erroneous distortions of an objective body, but as indicating that the body is first of all a being absorbed in outside things. The usual questions about perception are thus reversed: the question is not how the outside world is represented in an inside, but how a moving body ecstatically absorbed in things ever breaks out of that absorption. My suggested answer involves movement and has implications for rethinking nature.
Hegel on the Life of the Understanding
International Philosophical Quarterly (2006), 46 (184). pp. 403-419.
This article clarifies Hegel’s argument in “Force and the Understanding,” in his Phenomenology of Spirit, by developing Hegel’s underlying point through discussion of recent and ongoing issues concerning explanation in natural and psychological science. The latter proceeds via a critical discussion of the problem of other minds and the “theory theory of mind”. The article thereby shows how and why Hegel’s analysis of the understanding inaugurates a crucial transition in his Phenomenology, from consciousness to self-consciousness and life. Putting Hegel’s underlying points into conversation with recent science shows how his point—that scientific understanding is not abstract but embedded in human life—still speaks to science.
Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought (2006). Life and Individuation (7). VRIN/Mimesis/University of Memphis, pp. 225-239.
Ancient philosophy models non-living processes in terms of living beings; modern science and philosophy reverses this priority by conceiving the living as evolving from the non-living. Recent work in science and philosophy questions that reversal, by emphasizing how living beings are self-organizing, active agencies. But in the contemporary context we would need a new concept of nature to follow through on this reversal, to fit self-organizing organisms with nature as a whole. A study of the themes of structure, expression and sense across Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy opens a way toward this new concept. Points from Bergson and Hegel lead to a concept of expression as a movement that creates new possibility. Results from immunology and evolutionary cellular biology let us detect such a movement of sense in nature. This gives a model for thinking of nature as a whole as an expressive, living movement—for thinking of the law of the non-living as the visible outgrowth of an invisible expressive movement of the universe.
The Open Figure of Experience and Mind
Invited review essay of John Russon’s Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life, Dialogue 45(2006): 315-326.
The Southern Journal of Philosophy (2005), 43 (2). pp. 267-298.
Husserlian variation, Bergsonian intuition and Peirceian abduction are contrasted as methodological responses to the traditional philosophical problem of deriving knowledge of universals from singulars. Each method implies a correspondingly different view of the generation of the variations from which knowledge is derived. To make sense of the latter differences, and to distinguish the different sorts of variation sought by philosophers and scientists, a distinction between extensive, intensive, and abductive-intensive variation is introduced. The link between philosophical method and the generation of variation is used to illuminate different philosophical conceptions of nature and nature’s relation to meaning and sense.
Animals and Humans, Thinking and Nature
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2005), 4 (1). pp. 49-72.
Studies that compare human and animal behaviour suspend prejudices about mind, body and their relation, by approaching thinking in terms of behaviour. Yet comparative approaches typically engage another prejudice, motivated by human social and bodily experience: taking the lone animal as the unit of comparison. This prejudice informs Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s comparative studies, and conceals something important: that animals moving as a group in an environment can develop new sorts of “sense.” The study of animal group-life thus suggests a new way of thinking about the creation of sense, about the body, the brain, and the relation between thinking and nature.
Thinking the Body, from Hegel’s Speculative Logic of Measure to Dynamic Systems Theory
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (2002), 16 (New Series) (3). pp. 182-197
A study of shifts in scientific strategies for measuring the living body, especially in dynamic systems theory: 1) sheds light on Hegel’s concept of measure in The Science of Logic, and the dialectical transition from categories of being to categories of essence; 2) shows how Hegel’s speculative logic anticipates and analyzes key tensions in scientific attempts to measure and conceive the dynamic agency of the body. The study’s analysis of the body as having an essentially dynamic identity irreducible to measurement aims to contribute to reconceiving the body, in a way that may be helpful to overcoming dualism.
Touching Intelligence
Journal of Philosophy of Sport 29 (2002): 149-162
In this paper I discern an intelligence in the movement of touch. By interpreting results of dynamic systems theory within a phenomenological framework, I show how our experience of the intelligible, tactile length of things is constituted within our movement of wielding them. But how does our movement of wielding constitute an experience of the intelligible properties of a touched thing over against a touching body, rather than constituting an experience of the joint movement of toucher and touched? I try to resolve this problem about the relation of toucher and touched via a phenomenological study of what I call resonant or reverberant modalities of wielding, and melodic contours of wielding. I show that different melodic contours of wielding can emphasize resonant or reverberant modalities of wielding, and that resonance and reverberation correlate with different experiences of the interrelation and distinction of the toucher and the touched. At the end, I draw out several philosophical implications about movement and tactile intelligibility, and about the perceiver, the perceived and their interrelation.
Lived Time and Absolute Knowing: Habit and Addiction from Infinite Jest to the Phenomenology of Spirit
Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History (2001), 30 . pp. 375-415.
A study of habit and other unconscious backgrounds of action shows how shapes of spiritual life in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit each imply correlative senses of lived time. The very form of time thus gives spirit a sensuous encounter with its own concept. The point that conceptual content is manifest in the sensuous form of time is key to an interpretation of Hegel’s infamous and puzzling remarks about time and the concept in “Absolute Knowing.” The article also shows how Hegel’s Phenomenology connects with current discussions of lived time, habit, and, via discussion of Wallace’s Infinite Jest, addiction.
The Fold and The Body Schema in Merleau-Ponty and Dynamic Systems Theory
Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought (1999). Contemporary Issues in Merleau-Ponty (1). Vrin/Mimesis/University of Memphis, pp. 275-286.
Contemporary thought, whether it be in psychology, biology, immunology, philosophy of perception or philosophy of mind, is confronted with the breakdown of barriers between organism and environment, self and other, subject and object, perceiver and perceived. In this paper I show how Merleau-Ponty can help us think about this problem, by attending to a methodological theme in the background of his dialectical conception of embodiment. In La structure du comportement, Merleau-Ponty conceives life as extension folding back upon itself so as to reveal Hegel’s ‘hidden mind of nature.’ In the Phénoménologie de la perception, radical reflection elucidates the body schema as an essence that reveals itself within embodied existence, qua shaping the natural perceptual dialogue in which the perceiver and the perceived permeate and separate from one another. In these two conceptions of embodiment, we progressively see how the dialectical principle of embodiment must reveal and conceive itself within embodiment itself. Science, on the other hand, follows the phenomena of the body to a certain point, but refuses to allow that embodiment is self-conceptual. I illustrate this using the example of dynamic systems theory, an inheritor of the tradition of J.J. Gibson’s ecological psychology. In this way, I show how Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the dialectic of embodiment as self-conceptual is important to problems in contemporary thought.
The Logic of the Body in Bergson’s Motor Schemes and Merleau-Ponty’s Body Schema
Philosophy Today 44 (2000), Supplement 2000, Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy: 60-69
An analysis of Bergson’s motor schemes shows how there is a logic within the body, one that informs the recognition of images, and thence perception and memory. But for Bergson, this logic of the body is entirely explicit, and is distinct from the implicit logic that we find in thinking. A contrast with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body schema shows how the temporality of the body is crucial to Bergson’s distinction between the logic of the body and the logic of thinking, and suggests how we might find a logic of the body—but one that informs thinking—via Merleau-Ponty.
Southern Journal of Philosophy (1997), 35 (3). pp. 363-392.
Empirical and Phenomenological Studies of Embodied Cognition
in Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, edited by Daniel Schmicking and Shaun Gallagher, Springer 2010
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