•  33
    This collection is the first extended investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole as well as the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings the French phenomenologist’s views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus. Time, Memory, Institution argues that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity, as such, but is gathered out of a radical openness to what is not self, and t…Read more
  •  4
    Singularity as becoming oneself through others
    Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 7 (1): 37-73. 2019.
    Though singularity of the self can be understood in different ways, this essay argues that it ought ultimately to be understood temporally, in terms of becoming and the establishment of what Merleau-Ponty calls «personal institutions». Anorexia is used as a case study: anorexics can oscillate between feeling themselves expressed in their anorexic desires, and feeling themselves expressed in their opposition to anorexic desires. I argue, drawing upon Laing’s understanding of psychopathology, that…Read more
  •  20
    “To consent to love or be loved,” said Merleau-Ponty, “is to consent also to influence someone else, to decide to a certain extent on behalf of the other.” This essay explicates that idea through a meditation on intimacy. I propose, first, that, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, we are always transgressing into each other’s experience, whether we are strangers or familiars; I call this “ontological intimacy.” Concrete experiences of intimacy are based upon this ontological intimacy, and can take place…Read more
  •  16
    Merleau-Ponty on human development and the retrospective realization of potential
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (4): 609-621. 2017.
    In this essay, I propose that human development is the emergence of something significantly new out of a past situation that does not hold that novel achievement as a determinate potential except retrospectively. Development, in other words, might best be understood as a “realization” in the sense of a making-real of some new form of being that had no prior place in reality, that was not programmed in advance, but that once realized can have its roots traced back to determinate conditions and po…Read more
  •  37
    The Role of Emotion in an Existential Education: Insights from Hegel and Plato
    International Philosophical Quarterly 48 (4): 471-492. 2008.
    Emotion is usually conceived as playing a relatively external role in education: either it is raw material reshaped by rational practices, or it merely motivates intellectual reasoning. Drawing upon the philosophy of Hegel and Plato’s Socrates, I argue, however, that education is a process of existential transformation and that emotion plays an essential, internal role therein. Through an analysis of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic, I argue that emotions have their own logic and that an indiv…Read more
  •  34
    This is a French abstract, published in _Chiasmi_, describing an English-language article entitled "Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of “Letting Others Be” ."
  •  3
    Existential-Ontological Psychotherapy: Attuning to How Being Is at Issue
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 22 (2): 147-150. 2015.
    The core insight of Dr. Angelica Tratter’s essay, as I see it, is that we can approach the question of a person’s ways of being in the world in an ‘ontological’ rather than ‘ontical’ manner. Tratter communicates this insight primarily through a rehabilitation of Ludwig Binswanger’s notion of ‘world-design.’ In what follows, I wish both to affirm Tratter’s insight, and also, through my own elaboration of it, to propose some possible divergences of thought. As Tratter notes, Heidegger was unhappy …Read more
  •  29
    This is an Italian abstract, published in _Chiasmi, describing an English-language article published under the title "Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of “Letting Others Be”."
  •  91
    Embodied perceptions of others as a condition of selfhood?
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (8): 63-93. 2008.
    Against recent claims that infants begin with a sense of themselves as distinct selves, I propose that the infant's initial sense of self is still indeterminate and ambiguous, and is only progressively consolidated, beginning with embodied perceptions of others. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and Hegel's notion of mutual recognition, and with reference to empirical studies in developmental psychology, I argue that perceiving other persons is significantly different from…Read more
  •  25
    This is a French abstract for an English-language article, published as "Life is Inherently Expressive: A Merleau-Pontian response to Darwin's _The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals_"
  •  125
    This paper argues for an understanding of emotion based upon Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of embodiment and passivity. Through a critical assessment of cognitive theories of emotion, and in particular Solomon's theory, it argues (1) that there is a sense in which emotions may be judgments, so long as we understand such judgments as bodily enactments of meaning, but (2) that even understood in this way, the notion of judgment (or construal) can only account for a subset of emotions which I call "e…Read more
  •  41
    The Existentialist Reader (review)
    Teaching Philosophy 26 (1): 93-96. 2003.
  •  29
    Merleau-Ponty's Embodied Ethics: Rethinking Traditional Ethics
    In Christine Daigle (ed.), Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics, Mcgill/queen's University Press. pp. 142. 2006.
  •  5
    Emotional metamorphoses : The role of others in becoming a subject
    In Sue Campbell, Letitia Meynell & Susan Sherwin (eds.), Embodiment and Agency, Pennsylvania State University Press. 2009.