Abstracts
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at AAP 2013. If you've just submitted an abstract, it may take a few days to appear.
| Name: Mr Chris Pollard |
| Institution: Deakin University |
| Title: Is Merleau-Ponty’s position in 'Phenomenology of Perception' a new form of Transcendental Idealism? |
| Abstract: It has recently been suggested by Sebastian Gardner and Thomas Baldwin that Merleau-Ponty’s position in Phenomenology of Perception is a unique form of transcendental idealism. The general claim is that in spite of his critique of ‘Kantianism’, Merleau-Ponty’s position comes out as a form of transcendental idealism that takes the perceptual processes of the lived body as the transcendental constituting condition for the possibility of experience. In this paper I critically appraise this claim. I argue that the term ‘idealist’ is misplaced because Merleau-Ponty rejects the transcendental metaphysics of the reflecting subject that underpins transcendental idealism. And in its place he advocates a methodological transcendentalism that, whilst being anti-realist, is in not idealist. Thus to call his position ‘a new kind of transcendental idealism’, as Sebastian Gardner has, is to misunderstand the significance of his break with what he sees as the ‘logicism’ and ‘intellectualism’ of this position. |
| Keywords: Merleau-Ponty |
