Patrick Bourgeois

While naturalism is used in positive senses by the tradition of analytical philosophy, with Ludwig Wittgenstein its best example, and by the tradition of phenomenology, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty its best exemplar, it also has an extremely negative sense on both of these fronts. Hence, both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein in their basic thrusts adamantly reject reductionistic naturalism. Although Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology rejects the naturalism Husserl rejects, he early on found a place for the “truth of naturalism.” In a parallel way, Wittgenstein accepts a certain positive sense of naturalism, while rejecting Quine’s kind of naturalism. It is the aim of this paper to investigate the common ground in the views of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty regarding the naturalism that they each espouse and that which they each reject.

Not only does peirce's theory of meaning as dispositional or as habit contain parallels with merleau-ponty's view of meaning in the structure of human behavior, but also both peirce and merleau-ponty alike attack reductivistic theories of perception. within this context, the present paper focuses on the use of kantian schemata in the philosophies of peirce and merleau-ponty, but to the extent that such incorporations are consistent with trends in pragmatism and phenomenology in general, it will reveal points of encounter not just between peirce and merleau-ponty but between pragmatism and phenomenology in general.

This article on mystery and hope at the boundary of reason in the postmodern situation responds to the challenge of postmodern thinking to philosophyby a recourse to the works of Gabriel Marcel and his best disciple, Paul Ricoeur. It develops along the lines of their interpretation of hope as a central phenomenon in human experience and existence, thus shedding light on the philosophical enterprise for the future. It is our purpose to dwell briefly on this postmodern challenge and then, incorporating its positive contribution, to present theirs as an alternative philosophy at the boundary of reason.

My aim in this memorial paper is to recall two essential Ricoeurean themes that underlie his entire philosophical orientation and that respond well to specific challenges today from post-modern deconstruction. At question is whether Ricoeur's account of sign in language and the living present in time can adequately respond to and meet the recent challenge from postmodern deconstruction, which radically challenges the very root of his phenomenological and hermeneutic orientation: the priority of the semantic in language and the priority of the living present. Although Ricoeur and Derrida will be seen to address the same problems of decentering consciousness, their accounts, although agreeing on important issues, quickly become mutually exclusive and deconstruction becomes a challenge to Ricoeurean hermeneutics. I will turn first to the postmodern deconstruction of Jacques Derrida before turning to Ricoeur's response with a more viable view of language, sense, and lived time

The philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty may seem at first glance to be mutually exclusive. On further examination, however, they can be seen to share some fundamental points of view. For instance, they both share a common rejection of a modern mechanistic explanation of nature, and both endorse what we might call a pre-linguistic level of meaning. In this paper, we show that these thinkers not only share some fundamental philosophical views, but also had, for many years, contemplated what cognitive scientists today call “embodied cognition.”

Mead and Merleau-Ponty each portray the perceptual field as a field of spatially and temporally located, ontologically "thick" or resisting objects which are essentially related to the horizon of world, which allow for the very structure of the sensing which gives access to them, and whose manner of emergence undercuts the problematics of the subject-object split. This essay surveys this perceptual field as a focus for eliciting their more fundamental shared understanding of the dimensions of human activity which underlie its emergence

Thompson attempts to overcome some of the impasses within the longstanding controversies over the methods of the social sciences. Within this controversy, there is a polarization around two positions: one argues that the methods of the social sciences are essentially identical with those of the natural sciences, while the other contends that, since there is a radical discontinuity between the natural and the social domains, natural scientific method is inadequate to grasp the social world of the social sciences.