By Don Beith
“An original and thoughtful contribution to scholarship on Maurice Merleau-Ponty.…Beith draws Merleau-Ponty’s thought into conversation with a wide range of thinkers and traditions—Bergson, Deleuze, Derrida, liberalism, social constructivism, autopoietic enactivism—and articulates an original conception of life and personhood. Summing up: Essential.”
CHOICE Reviews
“A timely contribution to scholarship on Merleau-Ponty’s work, considering the emerging focus in phenomenological literature on the significance of the dimension of passivity.… Beith advances a phenomenology of embodiment by going beyond a mere ‘corporeal essentialism’ to a focus that can engage with difference and oppression generally and issues of gender and race more specifically”
Fiona Utley, University of New England, Australia
“Beith fruitfully deploys the concepts of 'institution' and 'passivity' to interpret central issues in Merleau-Ponty's corpus and in contemporary philosophy, ultimately offering an account of the emergence of personhood and sociality out of the matrix of intercorporeal embodiment and behavior. This is a significant addition not only to Merleau-Ponty scholarship but also, more broadly, to philosophical discussions about nature, development, learning, self-consciousness, agency, and politics.”
Scott Marratto, author of The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity
In The Birth of Sense, Don Beith proposes a new concept of generative passivity, the idea that our organic, psychological, and social activities take time to develop into sense. More than being a limit, passivity marks out the way in which organisms, persons, and interbodily systems take time in order to manifest a coherent sense. Beith situates his argument within contemporary debates about evolution, developmental biology, scientific causal explanations, psychology, postmodernism, social constructivism, and critical race theory. Drawing on empirical studies and phenomenological reflections, Beith argues that in nature, novel meaning emerges prior to any type of constituting activity or deterministic plan.
The Birth of Sense is an original phenomenological investigation in the style of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and it demonstrates that the French philosopher’s works cohere around the notion that life is radically expressive. While Merleau-Ponty’s early works are widely interpreted as arguing for the primacy of human consciousness, Beith argues that a pivotal redefinition of passivity is already under way here, and extends throughout Merleau-Ponty’s corpus. This work introduces new concepts in contemporary philosophy to interrogate how organic development involves spontaneous expression, how personhood emerges from this bodily growth, and how our interpersonal human life remains rooted in, and often thwarted by, domains of bodily expressivity.
Don Beith practices philosophy phenomenologically, researching the role of the body in self-identity and learning, the nature of interpersonal relationships, and existential concepts of health, care, and authenticity. His work appears in Chiasmi, Continental Philosophy Review, Symposium, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Maine. More info →
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Hardcover
978-0-8214-2310-3
Retail price: $95.00,
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Release date: April 2018
240 pages
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Electronic
978-0-8214-4626-3
Release date: April 2018
240 pages
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Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty
By Judith Wambacq
Questioning the dominant view that Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty have little of substance in common, Judith Wambacq draws on unpublished primary sources and current scholarship in English and French to bring them into a compelling dialogue to reveal a shared concern with the transcendental conditions of thought.
Philosophy | Movements | Phenomenology · Continental Philosophy · Philosophy
Time, Memory, Institution
Merleau-Ponty's New Ontology of Self
Edited by David Morris and Kym Maclaren
This is the first investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole and the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings his views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus, arguing that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity.
Philosophy | Aesthetics · Philosophy | Movements | Phenomenology · Philosophy
Merleau-Ponty
Space, Place, Architecture
Edited by Patricia M. Locke and Rachel McCann
Phenomenology has played a decisive role in the emergence of the discourse of place, and the contribution of Merleau-Ponty to architectural theory and practice is well established. This collection of essays by 12 eminent scholars is the first devoted specifically to developing his contribution to our understanding of place and architecture.
Philosophy | Movements | Phenomenology · Art Criticism and Theory · Philosophy | Aesthetics · Philosophy
From Mastery to Mystery
A Phenomenological Foundation for an Environmental Ethic
By Bryan E. Bannon
From Mastery to Mystery is an original and provocative contribution to the burgeoningfield of ecophenomenology. Informed by current debates in environmental philosophy, Bannon critiques the conception of nature as u200a“substance” that he finds tacitly assumed by the major environmental theorists.
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