Jasper van Buuren

Is materialism right to claim that the world of everyday-life experience – the phenomenal world – is nothing but an illusion produced in physical reality, notably in the brain? Or is Merleau-Ponty right when he defends the fundamental character of the phenomenal world while rejecting physical realism? Jasper van Buuren addresses these questions by exploring the nature of the body proper in Merleau-Ponty and Plessner, arguing that physical and phenomenal realism are not mutually exclusive but complementary. The argument includes a close examination of the relationships between scientific and pre-scientific perspectives, between living and non-living things, and between humans and animals.

Is materialism right to claim that the world of everyday-life experience – the phenomenal world – is nothing but an illusion produced in physical reality, notably in the brain? Or is Merleau-Ponty right when he defends the fundamental character of the phenomenal world while rejecting physical realism? I address these questions by exploring the nature of the body proper in Merleau-Ponty and Plessner, arguing that physical and phenomenal realism are not mutually exclusive but complementary. The argument includes a close examination of the relationships between scientific and pre-scientific perspectives, between living and non-living things, and between humans and animals.

Is materialism right to claim that the world of everyday-life experience – the phenomenal world – is nothing but an illusion produced in physical reality, notably in the brain? Or is Merleau-Ponty right when he defends the fundamental character of the phenomenal world while rejecting physical realism? I address these questions by exploring the nature of the body proper in Merleau-Ponty and Plessner, arguing that physical and phenomenal realism are not mutually exclusive but complementary. The argument includes a close examination of the relationships between scientific and pre-scientific perspectives, between living and non-living things, and between humans and animals.

In Sources of the Self Charles Taylor makes clear that both hypergoods and moral sources are essential to the moral life. Although hypergoods and moral sources are not the same thing, Taylor’s descriptions of these concepts are quite similar, and so their distinction requires interpretation. I propose that we interpret the difference on the basis of another distinction that is central to Taylor’s thinking: that between immanence and transcendence. Whereas a moral source transcends us, a hypergood is the value of our immanent way of relating to that moral source. This interpretation requires that we first differentiate between a narrow and a wide sense of “moral source.”

Bennett and Hacker criticize a number of neuroscientists and philosophers for attributing capacities which belong to the human being as a whole, like perceiving or deciding, to a “part” of the human being, viz. the brain. They call this type of mistake the “mereological fallacy”. Interestingly, the authors say that these capacities cannot be ascribed to the mind either. They reject not only materialistic monism but also Cartesian dualism, arguing that many predicates describing human life do not refer to physical or mental properties, nor to the sum of such properties. I agree with this important principle and with the critique of the mereological fallacy which it underpins, but I have two objections to the authors’ view. Firstly, I think that the brain is not literally a part of the human being, as suggested. Secondly, Bennett and Hacker do not offer an account of body and mind which explains in a systematic way how the domain of phenomena which transcends the mental and the physical relates to the mental and the physical. I first argue that Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology provides the kind of account we need. Then, drawing on Plessner, I present an alternative view of the mereological relationships between brain and human being. My criticism does not undercut Bennett and Hacker’s diagnosis of the mereological fallacy but rather gives it a more solid philosophical–anthropological foundation.