Editing Maurice Merleau-Ponty (section)

==Influence==

===Anticognitivist cognitive science===
Merleau-Ponty's critical position with respect to science was stated in his Preface to the ''Phenomenology'': he described scientific points of view as "always both naive and at the same time dishonest". Despite, or perhaps because of, this view, his work influenced and anticipated the strands of modern psychology known as [[post-cognitivism]]. [[Hubert Dreyfus]] has been instrumental in emphasising the relevance of Merleau-Ponty's work to current post-cognitive research, and its criticism of the traditional view of cognitive science.

Dreyfus's seminal critique of cognitivism (or the computational account of the mind), ''What Computers Can't Do'', consciously replays Merleau-Ponty's critique of intellectualist psychology to argue for the irreducibility of corporeal know-how to discrete, syntactic processes. Through the influence of Dreyfus's critique and neurophysiological alternative, Merleau-Ponty became associated with neurophysiological, connectionist accounts of cognition.

With the publication in 1991 of ''The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience'', by [[Francisco Varela]], [[Evan Thompson]], and [[Eleanor Rosch]], this association was extended, if only partially, to another strand of "anti-cognitivist" or post-representationalist cognitive science: embodied or [[enactivism|enactive]] cognitive science, and later in the decade, to [[neurophenomenology]]. In addition, Merleau-Ponty's work has also influenced researchers trying to integrate neuroscience with the principles of [[chaos theory]].<ref>{{cite journal|last=Skada|first=Christine|author2=Walter Freeman|title=Chaos and the New Science of the Brain|journal=Concepts in Neuroscience|date=March 1990|volume=1|pages=275–285}}</ref>

It was through this relationship with Merleau-Ponty's work that cognitive science's affair with phenomenology was born, which is represented by a growing number of works, including
* [[Ron McClamrock]], ''Existential Cognition: Computational Minds in the World'' (1995)
* [[Andy Clark]], ''Being There'' (1997)
* [[:fr:Jean_Petitot_(philosophe)|Jean Petitot]] et al. (eds.), ''Naturalizing Phenomenology'' (1999)
* [[Alva Noë]], ''Action in Perception'' (2004)
* [[Shaun Gallagher]], ''How the Body Shapes the Mind'' (2005)
* Franck Grammont, Dorothée Legrand, and [[Pierre Livet]] (eds.), ''Naturalizing Intention in Action'' (2010)
* The journal ''[[Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences]]''

===Feminist philosophy===
Merleau-Ponty has also been picked up by Australian and Nordic philosophers inspired by the French feminist tradition, including [[Rosalyn Diprose]] and {{Interlanguage link|Sara Heinämaa|fi}}.

Heinämaa has argued for a rereading of Merleau-Ponty's influence on Simone de Beauvoir. (She has also challenged Dreyfus's reading of Merleau-Ponty as behaviorist{{Citation needed|date=October 2007}}, and as neglecting the importance of the phenomenological reduction to Merleau-Ponty's thought.)

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body has also been taken up by [[Iris Young]] in her essay "[[Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality|Throwing Like a Girl]]," and its follow-up, "'Throwing Like a Girl': Twenty Years Later".  Young analyzes the particular modalities of feminine bodily comportment as they differ from that of men.  Young observes that while a man who throws a ball puts his whole body into the motion, a woman throwing a ball generally restricts her own movements as she makes them, and that, generally, in sports, women move in a more tentative, reactive way.  Merleau-Ponty argues that people experience the world in terms of the "I can" – that is, oriented towards certain projects based on capacity and habituality.  Young's thesis is that in women, this intentionality is inhibited and ambivalent, rather than confident, experienced as an "I cannot".

===Ecophenomenology<!--'Ecophenomenology' redirects here-->===
'''Ecophenomenology'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--> can be described as the pursuit of the relationalities of worldly engagement, both human and those of other creatures (Brown & Toadvine 2003).

This engagement is situated in a kind of middle ground of relationality, a space that is neither purely objective, because it is reciprocally constituted by a diversity of lived experiences motivating the movements of countless organisms, nor purely subjective, because it is nonetheless a field of material relationships between bodies. It is governed exclusively neither by causality, nor by intentionality. In this space of in-betweenness, phenomenology can overcome its inaugural opposition to naturalism.<ref>{{cite book|author=Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine, (Eds)|year=2003|title=Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself|location=Albany | publisher=SUNY Press}}</ref>

[[David Abram]] explains Merleau-Ponty's concept of "flesh" (''chair'') as "the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activity", and he identifies this elemental matrix with the interdependent web of earthly life.<ref>{{cite book|first=D.|last=Abram|year=1996|title=The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than Human World|url=https://archive.org/details/spellofsensuousp00abra_0|url-access=registration|pages=[https://archive.org/details/spellofsensuousp00abra_0/page/66 66]|publisher=Pantheon Books, New York|isbn=9780679438199}}</ref> This concept unites subject and object dialectically as determinations within a more primordial reality, which Merleau-Ponty calls "the flesh" and which Abram refers to variously as "the animate earth", "the breathing biosphere" or "the more-than-human natural world". Yet this is not nature or the biosphere conceived as a complex set of objects and objective processes, but rather "the biosphere as it is experienced and ''lived from within'' by the intelligent body — by the attentive human animal who is entirely a part of the world that he or she experiences. Merleau-Ponty's ecophenemonology with its emphasis on holistic dialog within the larger-than-human world also has implications for the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of language; indeed he states that "language is the very voice of the trees, the waves and the forest".<ref>{{cite book|first=D.|last=Abram|year=1996|title=The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World|url=https://archive.org/details/spellofsensuousp00abra_0|url-access=registration|pages=[https://archive.org/details/spellofsensuousp00abra_0/page/65 65]|publisher=Pantheon Books, New York|isbn=9780679438199}}</ref>

Merleau-Ponty himself refers to "that primordial being which is not yet the subject-being nor the object-being and which in every respect baffles reflection. From this primordial being to us, there is no derivation, nor any break..."<ref>{{cite book|title=The Concept of Nature, I, Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952-1960|publisher=Northwestern University Press|year=1970|pages=65–66}}</ref> Among the many working notes found on his desk at the time of his death, and published with the half-complete manuscript of ''The Visible and the Invisible'', several make it evident that Merleau-Ponty himself recognized a deep affinity between his notion of a primordial "flesh" and a radically transformed understanding of "nature". Hence, in November 1960 he writes: "Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother."<ref>{{cite book|title=The Visible and the Invisible|publisher=Northwestern University Press|year=1968|pages=267}}</ref> And in the last published working note, written in March 1961, he writes: "Nature as the other side of humanity (as flesh, nowise as 'matter')."<ref>{{cite book|title=The Visible and the Invisible|publisher=Northwestern University Press|year=1968|pages=274}}</ref> This resonates with the conception of space, place, dwelling, and embodiment (in the flesh and physical, vs. virtual and cybernetic), especially as they are addressed against the background of the unfolding of the essence of modern technology.  Such analytics figure in a Heideggerian take on "econtology" as an extension of Heidegger's consideration of the question of being (''Seinsfrage'') by way of the fourfold (''Das Geviert'') of earth-sky-mortals-divinities (''Erde und Himmel, Sterblichen und Göttlichen'').  In this strand of "ecophenomenology", ecology is co-entangled with ontology, whereby the worldly existential analytics are grounded in earthiness, and environmentalism is orientated by ontological thinking.<ref>See the research of [[Nader El-Bizri]] in this regard in his philosophical investigation of the notion of χώρα ([[Khôra]]) as it figured in the ''[[Timaeus (dialogue)|Timaeus]]'' dialogue of [[Plato]].  See for example: [[Nader El-Bizri]], "'''Qui-êtes vous Khôra?''': Receiving [[Plato]]'s ''[[Timaeus (dialogue)|Timaeus]]''," ''Existentia Meletai-Sophias'', Vol. XI, Issue 3-4 (2001), pp.&nbsp;473–490; [[Nader El-Bizri]], "''ON KAI KHORA'': Situating [[Heidegger]] between the ''[[Sophist]]'' and the ''[[Timaeus (dialogue)|Timaeus]]''," ''Studia Phaenomenologica'', Vol. IV, Issue 1-2 (2004), pp.&nbsp;73–98 [http://www.zetabooks.com/studia-phaenomenologica-volume-4-issue-1-2-2004-issues-on-brentano-husserl-and-heidegger.html] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181228223117/http://www.zetabooks.com/studia-phaenomenologica-volume-4-issue-1-2-2004-issues-on-brentano-husserl-and-heidegger.html|date=2018-12-28}}; [[Nader El-Bizri]], "''Ontopoiēsis'' and the Interpretation of [[Plato]]'s ''Khôra''," ''Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research'', Vol. LXXXIII (2004), pp.&nbsp;25–45.  Refer also to the more specific analysis of related Heideggerian leitmotifs in: [[Nader El-Bizri]], "Being at Home Among Things: [[Heidegger]]'s Reflections on Dwelling", ''Environment, Space, Place'' Vol. 3 (2011), pp.&nbsp;47–71; [[Nader El-Bizri]], "On Dwelling: Heideggerian Allusions to Architectural [[Phenomenology (architecture)|Phenomenology]]", ''Studia UBB. Philosophia'', Vol. 60, No. 1 (2015): 5-30; [[Nader El-Bizri]], "Phenomenology of Place and Space in our Epoch: Thinking along Heideggerian Pathways", in ''The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places'', ed. E. Champion (London : Routledge, 2018), pp.&nbsp;123–143.</ref>