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51Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of NatureNorthwestern University Press. 2009.In our time, Ted Toadvine observes, the philosophical question of nature is almost entirely forgotten—obscured in part by a myopic focus on solving "environmental problems" without asking how these problems are framed. But an "environmental crisis," existing as it does in the human world of value and significance, is at heart a philosophical crisis. In this book, Toadvine demonstrates how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has a special power to address such a crisis—a philosophical power far…Read more
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24Le temps des voix animalesChiasmi International 15 269-282. 2013.Phenomenology’s attention to the theme of animality has focused not on animal life in general but rather on the animal dimension of the human and its contested relation with humanity as such. Phenomenology thereby reproduces Agamben’s “anthropological machine” by which humanity is constructed through the “inclusive exclusion” of its animality. The alternative to this “inclusive exclusion” is not, however, a return to kinship or commonality but rather an intensification of the constitutive parado…Read more
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12Merleau-Ponty (edited book)Routledge. 2006.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) has been hailed by many as the greatest French thinker of the twentieth century. As one of the founding members of the existentialist movement in the 1940s, he played a key role in introducing the work of Husserl and Heidegger into French thought and collaborated with Jean-Paul Sartre in the founding of Les Temps Modernes. His later work laid the foundation for the development of French thought in the direction of post-structuralism and post-modernism.
Merleau…
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6Le temps des voix animalesChiasmi International 15 269-282. 2013.Phenomenology’s attention to the theme of animality has focused not on animal life in general but rather on the animal dimension of the human and its contested relation with humanity as such. Phenomenology thereby reproduces Agamben’s “anthropological machine” by which humanity is constructed through the “inclusive exclusion” of its animality. The alternative to this “inclusive exclusion” is not, however, a return to kinship or commonality but rather an intensification of the constitutive parado…Read more
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76Life beyond BiologismResearch in Phenomenology 40 (2): 243-266. 2010.In a move that has puzzled commentators, Derrida's The Animal that Therefore I Am rejects claims for continuity between the human and the animal, aligning such claims with the ideology of “biologistic continuism.” This problematization of the logic of the human-animal limit holds implications for how we are to understand life in relation to auto-affection, immanence in relation to transcendence, and naturalism in relation to phenomenology. Derrida's abyssal logic parallels the “strange kinship” …Read more
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36Limits of the Flesh: The Role of Reflection in David Abram’s EcophenomenologyEnvironmental Ethics 27 (2): 155-170. 2005.David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World convincingly demonstrates the contribution that phenomenology, especially the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, can make to environmental theory. But Abram’s account suffers from several limitations that are explored here. First, although Abram intends to develop an “organic” account of thinking as grounded in the sensible world, his descriptions castigate reflection and reverse, rather than rethinking, the …Read more
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15Anglo-American and Continental accounts of interpretive practice, as developed by David Henderson and Hans-Georg Gadamer agree on interpretation's holistic character and on the necessity of a charitable initial stage of interpretation which provides a background for later disagreements or attributions of irrationality. The divergence of these accounts regarding the weighting of charitable expectations and whether interpretation aims for explicability or agreement raises questions concerning the …Read more
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24Introduction: “Continental philosophy: What and where will it be?”Southern Journal of Philosophy 50 (2): 171-179. 2012.
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26How Not to be a JellyfishIn Christian Lotz & Corinne Painter (eds.), Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal, Springer. pp. 39--55. 2007.
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21Gestalts and RefrainsEnvironmental Philosophy 2 (2): 61-71. 2005.Western philosophy and culture have often posited a structural homology between music and nature. In a contemporary version of this association, deep ecologist Arne Naess proposes that the basic units of reality are hierarchically nested gestalts of a fundamentally relational character. I argue that Naess’s gestalt model fails to account for non-holistic or non-sensical experiences and for creative change in nature. I then suggest the concept of the “refrain”developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix…Read more
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12Derrida and Phenomenology, edited by William McKenna and J. Claude EvansJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30 (3): 348-350. 1999.
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16Diacritics of the Inexpressible: Tracing Expression with Véronique FótiChiasmi International 16 307-313. 2014.Véronique Fóti’s Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty demonstrates how the problem of expression motivates and unifies Merleau-Ponty’s investigations of art, life, nature, and ontology, culminating in a timely conception of nature as a differential expressive matrix. The key to this expressive ontology is diacritical difference. We raise three questions for this diacritical ontology: how it embodies the memory of the world, how it is interrupted by transcendence, and how it dissolves into element…Read more
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Douglas Low, Merleau-Ponty's Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of The Visible and the Invisible Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 22 (1): 50-52. 2002.
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20The Merleau-Ponty Reader (edited book)Northwestern University Press. 2007.The first reader to offer a comprehensive view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, this selection collects in one volume the foundational essays necessary for understanding the core of this critical twentieth-century philosopher’s thought. Arranged chronologically, the essays are grouped in three sections corresponding to the major periods of Merleau-Ponty’s work: First, the years prior to his appointment to the Sorbonne in 1949, the early, existentialist period during which he wrote important work…Read more
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8Absolution of Finitude in Hegel’s Phenomenology of SpiritSouthwest Philosophy Review 12 (2): 141-156. 1996.
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158Biodiversity at Twenty-Five Years: Revolution Or Red Herring?Ethics, Policy and Environment 18 (1): 16-29. 2015.A quarter of a century ago, a group of scientists and conservationists introduced ‘biodiversity’ as a media buzzword with the explicit intent of galvanizing public and political support for environ...
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16Experience and the Environment: Phenomenology Returns to Earth (review)Human Studies 28 (1): 101-106. 2005.
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