Sara Heinämaa

This paper problematizes the analogy that Hubert Dreyfus has presented between phenomenology and cognitive science. It argues that Dreyfus presents Merleau-Ponty''s modification of Husserl''s phenomenology in a misleading way. He ignores the idea of philosophy as a radical interrogation and self-responsibility that stems from Husserl''s work and recurs in Merleau-Ponty''s Phenomenology of Perception. The paper focuses on Merleau-Ponty''s understanding of the phenomenological reduction. It shows that his critical idea was not to restrict the scope of Husserl''s reductions but to study the conditions of possibility for the thetic acts. Merleau-Ponty argued, following Husserl''s texts, that the thetic acts rest on the basis of primordial pre-thetic experience. This layer of experience cannot, by its nature, be explicated or clarified, but it can be questioned and unveiled. This is the recurrent task of phenomenological philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty understands it.

Several commentators have argued that with his concept of anonymity Merleau-Ponty breaks away from classical Husserlian phenomenology that is methodologically tied to the first person perspective. Many contemporary commentators see Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity as a break away from Husserl’s framework that is seen as hopelessly subjectivistic and solipsistic. Some judge and reproach it as a disastrous misunderstanding that leads to a confusion of philosophical and empirical concerns. Both parties agree that Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of anonymity mark a divergence from classical Husserlian phenomenology. I will question this view and demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity remains Husserlian in two important senses: it analyses senses in terms of constituting selves and communities of such selves, and it accounts for the formation of experience by the temporal sedimentation of intentional activity. The argument proceeds in four steps. The first section argues against the widely spread notion according to which Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous subject is collective. In the second section, I offer an alternative reading by demonstrating that Merleau-Ponty uses the term “anonymous” primarily to characterize the lived body of a personal subject. In section three, I introduce Merleau-Ponty’s idea of trace and show that for him both the perceived thing and the perceiving body are traces and as such refer to earlier constitutive acts of alien subjects. I then argue that Husserl’s concepts of sedimentation are crucial for the understanding of this idea. Finally, in section four, I show how Husserl’s theory of depresentation informs Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity

Psychology and Philosophy provides a history of the relations between philosophy and the science of psychology from late scholasticism to contemporary discussions. The book covers the development from 16th-century interpretations of Aristotle’s De Anima, through Kantianism and the 19th-century revival of Aristotelianism, up to 20th-century phenomenological and analytic studies of consciousness and the mind. In this volume historically divergent conceptions of psychology as a science receive special emphasis. The volume illuminates the particular nature of studies of the psyche in the contexts of Aristotelian and Cartesian as well as 19th- and 20th-century science and philosophy. The relations between metaphysics, transcendental philosophy, and natural science are studied in the works of Kant, Brentano, Bergson, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and Davidson. Accounts of less known philosophers, such as Trendelenburg and Maine de Biran, throw new light on the history of the field. Discussions concerning the connections between moral philosophy and philosophical psychology broaden the volume’s perspective and show new directions for development. All contributions are based on novel research in their respective fields. The collection provides materials for researchers and graduate students in the fields of philosophy of mind, history of philosophy, and psychology.