E-Book Overview
This volume is the English translation of sixteen lectures by Maurice Merleau-Ponty given at the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1947-48 and reconstituted on the basis of notes taken by some of his most outstanding students. Devoted to three of the great names in the French philosophical tradition, Malebranche, Maine de Biran, and Bergson, these lectures centre on a classic problem: the union of the soul and the body. They reveal a line of reasoning that Merleau-Ponty had already traced in "The Structure of Behaviour" and "Phenomenology of Perception", and anticipate later developments of his innovative philosophical inquiry in "Signs" and "The Visible and the Invisible". In these lectures, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates how Malebranche had articulated an early phenomenology of the human condition, how Maine de Biran had anticipated the central project and related themes of the 'Phenomenology of Perception', and how certain features of Bergson's method announce key elements of the philosophical methodology expressed in Merleau-Ponty's later works. This volume contains one of Merleau-Ponty's most sustained explications and critiques of Bergson's "Matter and Memory", and, more important, his only major presentation and critique of the thought of Maine de Biran. The serious student of Merleau-Ponty and of the history of philosophy will find this unique volume of a hitherto-untranslated work of great value.
E-Book Content
The
INCARNATE SUBJECT
Also available in Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences Series Editors: HughJ. Silverman
and Graeme
Nicholson
Before Ethics Adriaan Peperzak
The Language of Difference, Charles E. Scott
Beyond Metaphysics John Llewelyn
Language and the Unconscious Jacques Lacan's Hermeneutics of Psychoanalysis Hermann Lang
The Deconstruction of Time David Wood Dialectic and Difference: Modern Thought and the Sense of Human Limits Jacques Taminiaux Elucidations of Holderlin's Poetry Martin Heidegger Translated by Keith Hoeller God and Being: Heidegger's Relation to Theology Jeff Owen Prudhomme Heidegger and the Question of Time Francoise Dastur Translated by Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew Heidegger and the Subject Francois Raffoul Translated by David Pettigrew and Gregory Recco History of Hermeneutics Maurizio Ferraris Illustrations of Being: Drawing upon Heidegger and upon Metaphysics Graeme Nicholson In the Presence of the Sensuous: Essays in Aesthetics Mikel Dufrenne Edited by Mark S. Roberts and Dennis Gallagher
Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking Otto Poggeler Michel Foucault's Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought James W Bernauer The Paths of Heidegger's Life and Thought Otto Poggeler Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics Bernard Flynn The Question of Language in Heidegger's History of Being Robert Bemasconi Rationalities, Historicities Dominique Janicaud Translated by Nina Belmonte Sensation: Intelligibility Is Sensibility Alphonso Lingis Structuralism: A Philosophy for the Human Sciences Peter Caws Texts and Dialogues Maurice Merleau-Ponty Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces Louis Marin
CONTEMPORARY STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES
The
INCARNATE SUBJECT Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY Preface by Jacques Taminiaux Translation by Paul B. Milan Edited by Andrew G. Bjelland Jr. and Patrick Burke
an imprint of Prometheus Books 59 John Glenn Drive, M e r i t , New York 14228-2197
Originally published in French as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L Union de I'&me et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson, Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1968. Collected and edited by Jean Deprun. © 1968 by Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. English Translation © 2001 by Pa