In this work, leading Merleau-Ponty scholars state and interpret the philosopher's later ontology of flesh and reversibility, some defending and some challenging its accommodation of alterity and difference. Claude Lefort's seminal lecture criticizing Merleau-Ponty's treatment of otherness in The Visible and the Invisible and two previously untranslated essays by Emmanual Levinas shape this dialogue on reversibility, reciprocity, symmetry, and asymmetry in self-other relationships extending across ethics, politics, epistemology, and child development. The contributors respond to Lefort's and Levinas's critiques and expand the discussion to Merleau-Ponty's other works and his relation to Derrida and Hegel.

Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy)

Politics & Social Sciences

Johnson, Galen A.

Philosophy

Northwestern Univ Pr

Merleau-Ponty's essays on aesthetics are some of the major accomplishments of his philosophical career, and rank even today among the most sophisticated reflections on art in all of twentieth-century philosophy. His essays on painting, "Cezanne's Doubt" (1945), "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" (1952), and "Eye and Mind" (1960), have inspired new approaches to epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of history. Galen A. Johnson has gathered these essays for the first time into a single volume and augmented them with essays by distinguished scholars and artists, including M.C. Dillon, Mikel Dufrenne, and René Magritte. Together the essays demonstrate the continuing significance of Merleau-Ponty's ideas about art for contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

Northwestern University Press

Merleau-Ponty's essays on aesthetics are some of the major accomplishments of his philosophical career, and rank even today among the most sophisticated reflections on art in all of twentieth-century philosophy. His essays on painting, "Cezanne's Doubt" (1945), "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" (1952), and "Eye and Mind" (1960), have inspired new approaches to epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of history. Galen A. Johnson has gathered these essays for the first time into a single volume and augmented them with essays by distinguished scholars and artists, including M.C. Dillon, Mikel Dufrenne, and René Magritte. Together the essays demonstrate the continuing significance of Merleau-Ponty's ideas about art for contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Northwester University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

History

In this elegant new study Galen Johnson retrieves the concept of the beautiful through the framework of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics. Although Merleau-Ponty seldom spoke directly of beauty, his philosophy is essentially about the beautiful. In Johnson’s formulation, the ontology of Flesh as element and the ontology of the Beautiful as elemental are folded together, for Desire, Love, and Beauty are part of the fabric of the world’s element, Flesh itself, the term at which Merleau-Ponty arrived to replace Substance, Matter, or Life as the name of Being. Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind is at the core of the book, so Johnson engages, as Merleau-Ponty did, the writings and visual work of Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Klee, as well as Rilke’s commentary on Cézanne and Rodin. From these widely varying aesthetics emerge the fundamental themes of the retrieval of the beautiful: desire, repetition, difference, rhythm, and the sublime. The third part of Johnson’s book takes each of these up in turn, bringing Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic thinking into dialogue with classical philosophy as well as Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. Johnson concludes his final chapter with a direct dialogue with Kant and Merleau-Ponty, and also Lyotard, on the subject of the beautiful and the sublime. As we experience with Rodin’s Balzac, beauty and the sublime blend into one another when the beautiful grows powerful, majestic, mysterious, and transcendent.

The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty's Aesthetics (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

This book is a philosophical inquiry into historical meaning and narrative understanding. Interpreting selected writings of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and stories of Kafka, Rilke, Sartre, and Camus, the author defends the narrative coherence of life and the irreducibility of narrative understanding and truth. The island imagery uncovered in these authors provides the parameters for a contemporary philosophy of history properly mingling earth and sky as natality and mortality, remembering and forgetting, wandering and homecoming, waking and dreaming, wealth and poverty. Johnson has pushed the life-world theme of Husserl's phenomenology out toward the wild-flowering world where it seems to have been headed.

Earth and Sky, History and Philosophy: Island Images Inspired by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (Studies in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Merleau-Ponty has long been known as one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics, yet most discussions of his aesthetics focus on visual art. This book corrects that balance by turning to Merleau-Ponty's extensive engagement with literature. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of "sensible ideas," from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as "co-naissance," from Valéry came "implex" or the "animal of words" and the "chiasma of two destinies." Literature also provokes the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontian poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, the book argues, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. Ultimately, theoretical figures or "figuratives" that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.

Literature & Fiction

Carbone, Mauro

Saint Aubert, Emmanuel de

History & Criticism

Fordham University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Johnson, Galen A.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Johnson, Galen A.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Johnson, Galen A.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy)

The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Northwester University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty's Aesthetics (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

Earth and Sky, History and Philosophy: Island Images Inspired by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (Studies in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)