John Montani

In this essay, I discuss how Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology concretizes our understanding of intentionality by rooting it in the body and in the senses in particular. In what follows I attempt to sketch out a version of "poly-intentionality" that I find implicit in Merleau-Ponty's chapter "Sensing" in his Phenomenology of Perception. Within this chapter, Merleau-Ponty argues that sensation is intentional, contrary to Husserl's stance that sensations require apperceptive acts of sense-giving in order to constitute them in experience.1 In addition to arguing for sensation's intentionality, Merleau-Ponty claims that each sense offers its own unique mode of intending. Intentionality, therefore, can...

ABSTRACT This article argues that Hegel’s speculative logic has an essentially rhythmic structure. Rhythm shows up in paragraphs 56–61 of the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel introduces the speculative proposition and explains his speculative logic. The article begins by analyzing some critical sections in the Preface to show how rhythm secures the formal passage of the subject into the predicate within the speculative proposition. Then, I briefly explore how Hegel’s speculative logic gets taken up in the writings of Gadamer and Nancy to show how each of these thinkers renews the rhythm of Hegel’s speculative logic in their own appropriations of it. The article concludes by extending the scope of speculation, taking it from the proposition to non-propositional forms of expression, and then finally to the sensible world.