Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Anya Daly

   Pages 1-35

3. Alterity: The Trace of the Other

   • Anya Daly

   Pages 37-59

4. Alterity: The Reversibility Thesis and the Visible

   • Anya Daly

   Pages 61-86

5. Alterity: The Reversibility Thesis and the Invisible

   • Anya Daly

   Pages 87-137

6. Objections to the Reversibility Thesis

   • Anya Daly

   Pages 139-172

7. Intersubjectivity: Phenomenological, Psychological and Neuroscientific Intersections

   • Anya Daly

   Pages 173-221

8. Primary Intersubjectivity: Affective Reversibility, Empathy and the Primordial ‘We’

   • Anya Daly

   Pages 223-248

9. The Social Matrix: Primary Empathy as the Ground of Ethics

   • Anya Daly

   Pages 249-280

10. The Ethical Interworld

    • Anya Daly

    Pages 281-303

11. Back Matter

    Pages 305-313

    PDF

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. 
                                             

• Merleau-Ponty
• Ethics
• The other
• Epistemology
• embodiment
• primordial percipience
• reversibility
• ontology

“In this careful and perceptive work Daly draws out the ethical implications of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the relations between self and other. Clear and engaging, she puts her account in conversation with key aspects of contemporary thought. Highly recommended.“ (Professor Kathleen Lennon, University of Hull)

“Daly has written an original, scholarly and provocative book, defending Merleau-Ponty’s unique emphasis on embodiment, perception and expression, and exploring critically his account of the mutual involvement between self, other and world, founded in empathic fellow-feeling, leading to a comprehensive philosophy of intersubjectivity. Daly’s synoptic account is a must read for all interested in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodied subjectivity.” (Dermot Moran, University College Dublin)

“Where better to find an embedded, embodied, enactive basis for ethics than in Merleau-Ponty!  Not just the embodied mind, but the empathic mind and the embodied person, always in relation to Others and characterized from the beginning by reversibility.   In regard to ethics, this is radically different from our standard (often individualistic) Western approaches, and Daly makes this clear through her insightful references to the Buddhist tradition.  Her analysis, like Merleau-Ponty’s own, is enriched by references to psychological and neuroscientific studies, and likewise innovative in her deft ability for constructing an integrated analysis.” (Shaun Gallagher, Philosophy, University of Memphis)

“Anya Daly addresses for the first time a question as central as it is difficult: that of the place and significance of ethics in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. She approaches this not only from the work of Merleau-Ponty, of which she is perfectly acquainted, but also effectively drawing on major English-speaking philosophers, as well as recent developments in neurobiology. Written in a lively and measured style, this book indisputably sheds new light on Merleau-Ponty and contributes significantly to the question of the foundation of ethics.” (Renaud Barbaras, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)

• The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

  Anya Daly

Anya Daly completed a double-badged doctorate from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and l’Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, in December 2012. Her thesis, ‘The problem of the Other in the work of Merleau-Ponty: From Epistemology to Ethics’ explicated Merleau-Ponty’s implicit ethics from his accounts of embodiment, primordial percipience and his non-dual ontology.

Anya Daly spent five years in France researching and teaching across various disciplines in undergraduate, masters and doctoral programs, returning to Australia in 2010. Since then she has been based in Melbourne where she has taught on a number of the undergraduate programs in the Philosophy Department at the University of Melbourne.  Her research continues to be focused on the nexus phenomenology, neuroscience and psychology, specifically with regard to perception, destructiveness and ethical failure. Her additional research interests include creativity, aesthetics, the philosophy of psychiatry and Buddhist philosophy.

                                         

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