Course 3 of 4
Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Embodiment
Study Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and the body, the core of this program. You'll learn why he rejected both empiricist and intellectualist accounts of perception, how he described the body as a subject that understands its world through movement and habit, and how he extended these ideas to other people, language, painting, and, in his late work, the "flesh" of the world. You'll also see how critical phenomenologists have used his ideas to study gender and race. Merleau-Ponty is the main philosophical source for embodied cognition, so these ideas are essential if you plan to work in consciousness studies.
Who this is for
You'll get the most out of this course if you can explain intentionality, the phenomenological reduction, and being-in-the-world in your own words. It's designed for graduate-level readers who are ready to work closely with a demanding primary text.
What you will learn
- Explain Merleau-Ponty's case for the primacy of perception over empiricism and intellectualism
- Analyze the body schema, motor intentionality, and habit using clinical and everyday examples
- Interpret Merleau-Ponty's accounts of others, language, painting, and the flesh of the world
- Evaluate how critical phenomenology extends the body-subject to gender and race
Contents
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Module 1 Merleau-Ponty: The Primacy of Perception
Learn why Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that perception, not thought, is our most basic contact with the world. You'll see how he dismantled both empiricist and intellectualist accounts of perception, describe the perceptual field with its figure–ground structure and constancies, and interpret his famous claim that the phenomenological reduction can never be completed. These ideas are the philosophical foundation of today's embodied and enactive approaches to perception and consciousness.
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Module 2 Merleau-Ponty: The Body-Subject
Explore Merleau-Ponty's account of the body as a subject that understands its world through movement, before any explicit thought. You'll learn the body schema and motor intentionality, analyze the phantom limb and the famous Schneider case, and describe how habits and skills weave tools into the lived body. These ideas are the direct philosophical basis for embodied cognition research on action, skill, and tool use.
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Module 3 Merleau-Ponty: Others, Language, and Art
Follow Merleau-Ponty's body-subject into our relations with other people, language, and art, and into its uses in critical phenomenology. You'll learn how we perceive others through intercorporeality, why speech is a kind of bodily gesture, what painting reveals about vision and expression, and how Fanon, Young, and Ahmed extend these ideas to race, gender, and orientation. These accounts shape current research on social cognition, language, aesthetics, and the lived experience of social difference.
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Module 4 Late Merleau-Ponty: Flesh and Chiasm
Explore Merleau-Ponty's late, unfinished philosophy of "flesh," in which perceiver and perceived are two sides of one fabric rather than a subject facing an object. You'll learn why he came to see his earlier work as still tied to a philosophy of consciousness, what flesh, reversibility, and the chiasm mean, and how they reframe the relation among mind, world, and nature. These ideas inform current work on relational and ecological approaches to mind, and on consciousness as rooted in life and nature.