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3What Can We Learn about the Normal from the Pathological?In Talia Welch & Susan Bredlau (eds.), Normality, Abnormality, and Pathology in Merleau-Ponty, Suny Press. pp. 41-62. 2022.
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265Skill and the Critique of Descartes in Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-PontyIn Kascha Semonovitch Neal DeRoo (ed.), Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception, Continuum. pp. 63. 2010.The mechanistic concept of the body, as inherited from René Descartes, has generated considerable trouble in philosophy—including, at least in part, the mind-body problem itself. Still, the corps mécanique remains perhaps the most prevalent though least examined assumption in recent philosophy of mind. I discuss two notable exceptions. Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty rejected this assumption for surprisingly similar reasons. Writing at about the same time, though in different languages…Read more
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2513Gilbert Ryle’s adverbialismBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 28 (2): 318-335. 2020.Gilbert Ryle famously wrote that practical knowledge (knowing how) is distinct from propositional knowledge (knowing that). This claim continues to have broad philosophical appeal, and yet there are many unsettled questions surrounding Ryle’s basic proposal. In this article, I return to his original work in order to perform some intellectual archeology. I offer an interpretation of Ryle’s concept of action that I call ‘adverbialism’. Actions are constituted by bodily behaviours performed in a ce…Read more
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2787Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's concept of motor intentionality: Unifying two kinds of bodily agencyEuropean Journal of Philosophy 26 (2): 763-779. 2018.I develop an interpretation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of motor intentionality, one that emerges out of a reading of his presentation of a now classic case study in neuropathology—patient Johann Schneider—in Phenomenology of Perception. I begin with Merleau-Ponty's prescriptions for how we should use the pathological as a guide to the normal, a method I call triangulation. I then turn to his presentation of Schneider's unusual case. I argue that we should treat all of Schneider's behavio…Read more
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398Starting with Merleau‐Ponty, by Katherine J.Morris. New York: Continuum, 2012. 216 pp. ISBN 978‐1‐84706‐281‐9 $24 (review)European Journal of Philosophy 22 (S3): 8-12. 2014.
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459Seeing what is not seenPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (3): 503-519. 2018.This paper connects ideas from twentieth century Gestalt psychology, experiments in vision science, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. I propose that when we engage in simple sensorimotor tasks whose successful completion is open, our behavior may be motivated by practical perceptual awareness alone, responding to invariant features of the perceptual field that are invisible to other forms of perceptual awareness. On this view, we see more than we think we see, as evidenced…Read more
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156“Review of Does Perception Have Content? edited by Berit Brogaard" (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 1. 2015.
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464Skillful action in peripersonal spacePhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (2): 313-334. 2014.In this article, I link the empirical hypothesis that neural representations of sensory stimulation near the body involve a unique motor component to the idea that the perceptual field is structured by skillful bodily activity. The neurophenomenological view that emerges is illuminating in its own right, though it may also have practical consequences. I argue that recent experiments attempting to alter the scope of these near space sensorimotor representations are actually equivocal in what they…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Phenomenology |
Feminist Philosophy |