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Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France
Collected here are the written traces of courses on the concept of nature given by Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the Collège de France in the 1950s-notes that provide a window on the thinking of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. In two courses distilled by a student and in a third composed of Merleau-Ponty's own notes, the ideas that animated the philosopher's lectures and that informed his later publications emerge in an early, fluid form in the process of being elaborated, negotiated, critiqued, and reconsidered.
Merleau-Ponty's project in these courses is an interrogation of nature, a task at the center of his investigation of perception, truth, and subjectivity. The first course, a survey of the historical elements in our concept of nature, examines first the Cartesian concept of nature and then historical and contemporary responses to Descartes, all with an eye toward developing a vision of nature more consistent with the findings of contemporary science.
In the second course, Merleau-Ponty takes up the problem of the relation of nature to ontology in general. Here, the key question is how the animal finds itself in its world. Because the human body is ultimately "an animal of movements and perceptions," humanity is intertwined with animality.
In the third course, "Nature and Logos: The Human Body," Merleau-Ponty assesses his previous findings and examines the emergence of the human body at the intersection of nature and Logos. This course, contemporaneous with the working notes for The Visible and the Invisible, allows us to observe the evolution of that work as well as to revisit the research he had begun in Primacy of Perception.
In these traces: a new reading of Descartes; a measured appreciation of Schelling; an assessment of recent developments in the sciences (both physical and biological) that leads to the notion of the body as a "system of equivalencies"; and an examination of the phenomenon of life. We have a wealth of material that allows us to reconsider Merleau-Ponty's thinking and to engage his philosophical project anew.
Merleau-Ponty's project in these courses is an interrogation of nature, a task at the center of his investigation of perception, truth, and subjectivity. The first course, a survey of the historical elements in our concept of nature, examines first the Cartesian concept of nature and then historical and contemporary responses to Descartes, all with an eye toward developing a vision of nature more consistent with the findings of contemporary science.
In the second course, Merleau-Ponty takes up the problem of the relation of nature to ontology in general. Here, the key question is how the animal finds itself in its world. Because the human body is ultimately "an animal of movements and perceptions," humanity is intertwined with animality.
In the third course, "Nature and Logos: The Human Body," Merleau-Ponty assesses his previous findings and examines the emergence of the human body at the intersection of nature and Logos. This course, contemporaneous with the working notes for The Visible and the Invisible, allows us to observe the evolution of that work as well as to revisit the research he had begun in Primacy of Perception.
In these traces: a new reading of Descartes; a measured appreciation of Schelling; an assessment of recent developments in the sciences (both physical and biological) that leads to the notion of the body as a "system of equivalencies"; and an examination of the phenomenon of life. We have a wealth of material that allows us to reconsider Merleau-Ponty's thinking and to engage his philosophical project anew.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
313 pages, Paperback
First published January 30, 1900
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About the author
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
124 books613 followersFrench phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. Like the other major phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty expressed his philosophical insights in writings on art, literature, and politics; however Merleau-Ponty was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the Twentieth Century to engage extensively with the sciences, and especially with descriptive psychology. Because of this engagement, his writings have become influential with the recent project of naturalizing phenomenology in which phenomenologists utilize the results of psychology and cognitive science.
Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime. His father was killed in World War 1 when Merleau-Ponty was 3. After secondary schooling at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930.
Merleau-Ponty first taught at Chartres, then became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945).
After teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a Chair.
Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for Les Temps Modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952.
Aged 53, he died suddenly of a stroke in 1961, apparently while preparing for a class on Descartes. He was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime. His father was killed in World War 1 when Merleau-Ponty was 3. After secondary schooling at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930.
Merleau-Ponty first taught at Chartres, then became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945).
After teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a Chair.
Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for Les Temps Modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952.
Aged 53, he died suddenly of a stroke in 1961, apparently while preparing for a class on Descartes. He was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 25, 2020
The notes are collected from a series of three consecutive courses which MP taught at the Collège de France from 1956 until 1960. For the first two courses, we have a student's notes--Xavier Tillman's--which are written in complete sentences and paragraphs. The notes from the third course are MP's, and are written in cryptic sentence fragments, which make for a fun and massively disorienting read.
The first course, "The Concept of Nature," provides a history of the ways in which philosophers from Aristotle to Alfred North Whitehead have thought about nature. There is a fair amount of time spent on "Nature as the Idea of an Entirely Exterior Being," which compares Descartes', Leibniz's, and Spinoza's writing about the relationship between nature and God (which focuses on the tensions between God's infinite possibilities and nature's finite reality, and between nature as a creative producer and nature as a created product). MP also provides a close reading of the Meditations which points out a tension between the idea of nature offered to Descartes' reflective consciousness (which is known clearly and distinctly and requires the separation of meaning and matter) and the perception of nature offered to Descartes' senses in everyday life (in which meaning and matter are united in practicalt action, but in a manner which resists being known). MP then moves onto "The Humanist Conception of Nature" as it is exemplified by Kant and Brunschvicg. It's not until "The Romantic Conception of Nature" that the course gets really interesting. MP's explication of Schelling's Naturphilosophie is fascinating; he provides a close reading of Bergson's Creative Evolution, and Husserl's unpublished notes on the Earth as "the ark of the possible." Nature has journeyed from Aristotelian finalism to Cartesian mechanism to ideally-constituted Kantian phenomenon to unconsciously self-constituted perceptual phenomenon. The final section of the course examines the implications of quantum mechanics upon the classical conception of nature--MP runs through the Bohr-Einstein debate about determinacy and situated knowledge, and the Einstein-Bergson debate about lived time--and then introduces Whitehead's notions of prehension, sampling, and the passage of time. The general idea in this section is that nature has moved from a being made of determinate "points" to a moving field of which our snapshots give us an irreducibly blurred image. Compare with the passage on Zeno's paradox in Phenomenology of Perception.
Since Descartes, the concept of nature has been implicitly and explicitly informed by the dualities of activity and passivity, subject and object, and being and nothingness. Philosophers have largely failed to unite the two poles without collapsing one into the other. MP seems to want to return to a pre-modern notion in which nature and logos are coextensive with each other by virtue of our naive perceptual engagement with the world. Since perception mediates the aforementioned dualities, and involves an organism's entire body, MP declares that the investigation into nature must begin from our own corporeality. Once again, MP calls attention to the pivotal role that bodies play in uniting a living being with its natural world. So it only makes sense that the second course is entitled "Animality, the Human Body, and the Passage to Culture." MP begins by declaring his intent to overcome ontotheology through a phenomenological conception of nature. He critiques cybernetics and robotics for attempting (and failing) to conceive of organisms as information machines, and then he turns to Gesell, Russell, and Dreisch on embryology and ontogeny, Lorenz and Tinberg on instinctive behavior and mimicry, and Portmann on animal appearances. MP concludes that life contains a weak negative force which continually throws the organism out of balance towards a future whose possibilities are delineated by the historical and material circumstances of the organism. He also concludes--against Darwin--that aesthetic expression, and not survival of the species, is the ultimate biological force which guides organisms and evolution more generally. Finally, MP turns to Jakob von Uexküll's concept of Umwelt to highlight the holistic dialectic between perceiving organism and perceived environment, which seems to adequately escape the aforementioned tensions between subject and object, activity and passivity, and being and nothingness.
Having established the existence of meaning, culture, and institution among animals, MP now turns to humans in his third course, "Nature and Logos: The Human Body." He reiterates again that nature is the ultimate expression of any ontology, and that nature is best grasped through our own bodies. This string of thoughts seems to parallel Heidegger's method in Being and Time, in which Heidegger suggests that we will understand Being by focusing on Dasein, the Being which we are. It's just that MP rejects Heidegger's "ontological difference" and anthropocentrism, so that MP thinks that we will learn about nature by studying human beings, just as we have learned about human beings by studying nature. The point at which humans emerged from their evolutionary ancestors is indiscernable, since evolution is a series of continuous divergences, and we can always find a more anterior ancestor until we are back to the first prokaryotic extremophiles. However, at some point, it's clear that humans are significantly different from other animals by virtue of our capacity to live in symbolic worlds and cultural institutions--the anticipations of which can be found in many forms of animal life, like the mating dances of birds and crabs or the head movements of fish, but which really take off in speaking and writing human beings. MP grounds human language in the diacritical gestalts of the perceived world, which is simultaneously the projection of the diacritical system of our corporeal schema--therefore his insistence that corporeality is already symbolic, that there is a silent language of the eyes and of the hand in its interrogation of the world and its attentiveness to the world's response. A living body unites the dualisms mentioned above--subject and object, activity and passivity, and being and nothingness--by virtue of being a sensible and visible thing in the world which also "invisibly" senses the world. Here MP introduces the language of The Visible and the Invisible: by virtue of being both sentient and sensible, a living body can become aware of itself as a being in the world, which institutes a reversible reflexivity that provides the ground for reflective self-consciousness. The metaphor of the mirror (borrowed from Henri Wallon and Jacques Lacan) provides the model for what Merleau-Ponty "flesh"--the flesh of my body is reflected back to me in the sensible world; every moment of perception is accompanied by a moment of self-perception from the outside, as another would see me. The flesh of my body is mirrored by the "flesh of the world," and the two encroach or overlap upon one another in a "fundamental narcissism." This is another way of stating the priority of the phenomenological correlation--no perceiver without a perceived, no perceived without a perceiver--with an emphasis on the correlation itself, rather than either of the relata, as the originary being. When I look at something or someone, I can see myself seeing; when I touch something or someone, I can touch myself touching; and the touching and the touched self, the seeing and the seen self (or, alternatively, the invisible and the visible self) are two separate sides of the same general phenomenon of perceptual reflexivity. The unity of the body's two aspects makes me a divided subject who is never at peace with myself (since "identity" here is founded upon the incorporation of the two different sides), and provides the ontological ground for the truth of nature's duality as it has been expressed in previous philosophies. Flesh is also the invisible architectonic which associates individuals with each other by virtue of a participation in an anonymous generality. The red of a dress, the red roofs of Aix, and a red apple are all folded into the same flesh of "red." This is another way to talk about the relationships of universal concepts and singular individuals without using the traditional words. The course ends with MP attempting to combine his concept of the flesh with psychoanalytic notions like projection and introjection, identification, repression, ambivalence, and libido. Perception is aligned with the unconscious and with libidinal desire. Then the notes stop abruptly.
After all of the ground covered in this book--God, quantum physics, cybernetics, embryology, evolution, animal institutions, psychoanalysis, and the rest--flesh is the conclusion, just as it is in the unfinished manuscript and working notes to The Visible and The Invisible. Flesh is a fascinating concept, but it's also somewhat of a dead end. Philosophy for MP begins and ends with remembering our participation in the flesh of the world folding and refolding upon itself. We are nature perceiving itself--leaving itself and returning to itself, both ever the same and always new. This eternity in every instant provides a quasi-religious way to come to rest in the movement of everyday life. For all of its emphasis on differentiation and production, the flesh ultimately rests upon a work of incorporation that has already been done before my conscious awareness. What is there for a thinking person to do *besides* turn their attention towards the flesh? What about ethics? What about anxiety? What about the radical alterity of others? These questions have all been asked of MP's flesh, and I don't think that flesh, as MP has laid it out, handles them very well. Others are a variant of my flesh, just as I am variant of theirs. I am other to myself and that is why I have an understanding of others. Fine. Flesh might seem to imply a kind of reciprocal ethics of care, since what I do to another I do to my own flesh, but it doesn't explain how or why variants of the world's flesh can turn against each other in hatred. The implication, from MP's engagement with psychoanalysis, would be that aggression towards others is a kind of misrecognition of the other, a failure to incorporate them into oneself (and concomitantly, a fear of being incorporated by the other). And what about non-reciprocal relationships, relationships not based off of a mirror image but instead based off of a parasite and its host, or two enemies, or--escaping the dyadic relationship structure altogether, a triad? A quartet? An n+1? The flesh is the model of the primary narcissism of the infant-mother enmeshment (and of the self-other indistinction more generally) which splits into two poles in individuated adult life. Flesh can contain undifferentiated oceanic feeling and alienated subjectivity, since it is always a being in-division, always moving away from itself by folding back towards itself, since, being double-sided, it is already a one-which-is-two and a two-which-is-one. But MP's emphasis on flesh is nearly always in the sense of a return to a movement of in-division. Even though the flesh is always moving away from oceanic feeling, it is never too far away, and it's probably the closest anyone can get without disappearing. MP was responding to the individualism and alienation which Cartesian thought served to the world, and flesh means that we are never alone (or ever fully ourselves, for that matter). But MP's emphasis on the meaningful oneness of self and world can make flesh feel like a retreat from a fragmented world, more like a new age spirituality ot a psychotherapeutic stress management technique than a truly philosophical way of engaging with the world, with all of its contingencies, anxieties, disparate parts, and senselessness.
What the flesh needs in order to stay interesting is to be ripped apart, to become what Deleuze called "meat," to lack coherency, to be stifled in its movements, to rot from the inside--ultimately, it needs to fail to be universal. It needs to fail to incorporate everything into itself. It has to have an outside. What produced the flesh? What comes next? Otherwise, our coming to rest in the movement of the flesh is death by suffocation and boredom.
The first course, "The Concept of Nature," provides a history of the ways in which philosophers from Aristotle to Alfred North Whitehead have thought about nature. There is a fair amount of time spent on "Nature as the Idea of an Entirely Exterior Being," which compares Descartes', Leibniz's, and Spinoza's writing about the relationship between nature and God (which focuses on the tensions between God's infinite possibilities and nature's finite reality, and between nature as a creative producer and nature as a created product). MP also provides a close reading of the Meditations which points out a tension between the idea of nature offered to Descartes' reflective consciousness (which is known clearly and distinctly and requires the separation of meaning and matter) and the perception of nature offered to Descartes' senses in everyday life (in which meaning and matter are united in practicalt action, but in a manner which resists being known). MP then moves onto "The Humanist Conception of Nature" as it is exemplified by Kant and Brunschvicg. It's not until "The Romantic Conception of Nature" that the course gets really interesting. MP's explication of Schelling's Naturphilosophie is fascinating; he provides a close reading of Bergson's Creative Evolution, and Husserl's unpublished notes on the Earth as "the ark of the possible." Nature has journeyed from Aristotelian finalism to Cartesian mechanism to ideally-constituted Kantian phenomenon to unconsciously self-constituted perceptual phenomenon. The final section of the course examines the implications of quantum mechanics upon the classical conception of nature--MP runs through the Bohr-Einstein debate about determinacy and situated knowledge, and the Einstein-Bergson debate about lived time--and then introduces Whitehead's notions of prehension, sampling, and the passage of time. The general idea in this section is that nature has moved from a being made of determinate "points" to a moving field of which our snapshots give us an irreducibly blurred image. Compare with the passage on Zeno's paradox in Phenomenology of Perception.
Since Descartes, the concept of nature has been implicitly and explicitly informed by the dualities of activity and passivity, subject and object, and being and nothingness. Philosophers have largely failed to unite the two poles without collapsing one into the other. MP seems to want to return to a pre-modern notion in which nature and logos are coextensive with each other by virtue of our naive perceptual engagement with the world. Since perception mediates the aforementioned dualities, and involves an organism's entire body, MP declares that the investigation into nature must begin from our own corporeality. Once again, MP calls attention to the pivotal role that bodies play in uniting a living being with its natural world. So it only makes sense that the second course is entitled "Animality, the Human Body, and the Passage to Culture." MP begins by declaring his intent to overcome ontotheology through a phenomenological conception of nature. He critiques cybernetics and robotics for attempting (and failing) to conceive of organisms as information machines, and then he turns to Gesell, Russell, and Dreisch on embryology and ontogeny, Lorenz and Tinberg on instinctive behavior and mimicry, and Portmann on animal appearances. MP concludes that life contains a weak negative force which continually throws the organism out of balance towards a future whose possibilities are delineated by the historical and material circumstances of the organism. He also concludes--against Darwin--that aesthetic expression, and not survival of the species, is the ultimate biological force which guides organisms and evolution more generally. Finally, MP turns to Jakob von Uexküll's concept of Umwelt to highlight the holistic dialectic between perceiving organism and perceived environment, which seems to adequately escape the aforementioned tensions between subject and object, activity and passivity, and being and nothingness.
Having established the existence of meaning, culture, and institution among animals, MP now turns to humans in his third course, "Nature and Logos: The Human Body." He reiterates again that nature is the ultimate expression of any ontology, and that nature is best grasped through our own bodies. This string of thoughts seems to parallel Heidegger's method in Being and Time, in which Heidegger suggests that we will understand Being by focusing on Dasein, the Being which we are. It's just that MP rejects Heidegger's "ontological difference" and anthropocentrism, so that MP thinks that we will learn about nature by studying human beings, just as we have learned about human beings by studying nature. The point at which humans emerged from their evolutionary ancestors is indiscernable, since evolution is a series of continuous divergences, and we can always find a more anterior ancestor until we are back to the first prokaryotic extremophiles. However, at some point, it's clear that humans are significantly different from other animals by virtue of our capacity to live in symbolic worlds and cultural institutions--the anticipations of which can be found in many forms of animal life, like the mating dances of birds and crabs or the head movements of fish, but which really take off in speaking and writing human beings. MP grounds human language in the diacritical gestalts of the perceived world, which is simultaneously the projection of the diacritical system of our corporeal schema--therefore his insistence that corporeality is already symbolic, that there is a silent language of the eyes and of the hand in its interrogation of the world and its attentiveness to the world's response. A living body unites the dualisms mentioned above--subject and object, activity and passivity, and being and nothingness--by virtue of being a sensible and visible thing in the world which also "invisibly" senses the world. Here MP introduces the language of The Visible and the Invisible: by virtue of being both sentient and sensible, a living body can become aware of itself as a being in the world, which institutes a reversible reflexivity that provides the ground for reflective self-consciousness. The metaphor of the mirror (borrowed from Henri Wallon and Jacques Lacan) provides the model for what Merleau-Ponty "flesh"--the flesh of my body is reflected back to me in the sensible world; every moment of perception is accompanied by a moment of self-perception from the outside, as another would see me. The flesh of my body is mirrored by the "flesh of the world," and the two encroach or overlap upon one another in a "fundamental narcissism." This is another way of stating the priority of the phenomenological correlation--no perceiver without a perceived, no perceived without a perceiver--with an emphasis on the correlation itself, rather than either of the relata, as the originary being. When I look at something or someone, I can see myself seeing; when I touch something or someone, I can touch myself touching; and the touching and the touched self, the seeing and the seen self (or, alternatively, the invisible and the visible self) are two separate sides of the same general phenomenon of perceptual reflexivity. The unity of the body's two aspects makes me a divided subject who is never at peace with myself (since "identity" here is founded upon the incorporation of the two different sides), and provides the ontological ground for the truth of nature's duality as it has been expressed in previous philosophies. Flesh is also the invisible architectonic which associates individuals with each other by virtue of a participation in an anonymous generality. The red of a dress, the red roofs of Aix, and a red apple are all folded into the same flesh of "red." This is another way to talk about the relationships of universal concepts and singular individuals without using the traditional words. The course ends with MP attempting to combine his concept of the flesh with psychoanalytic notions like projection and introjection, identification, repression, ambivalence, and libido. Perception is aligned with the unconscious and with libidinal desire. Then the notes stop abruptly.
After all of the ground covered in this book--God, quantum physics, cybernetics, embryology, evolution, animal institutions, psychoanalysis, and the rest--flesh is the conclusion, just as it is in the unfinished manuscript and working notes to The Visible and The Invisible. Flesh is a fascinating concept, but it's also somewhat of a dead end. Philosophy for MP begins and ends with remembering our participation in the flesh of the world folding and refolding upon itself. We are nature perceiving itself--leaving itself and returning to itself, both ever the same and always new. This eternity in every instant provides a quasi-religious way to come to rest in the movement of everyday life. For all of its emphasis on differentiation and production, the flesh ultimately rests upon a work of incorporation that has already been done before my conscious awareness. What is there for a thinking person to do *besides* turn their attention towards the flesh? What about ethics? What about anxiety? What about the radical alterity of others? These questions have all been asked of MP's flesh, and I don't think that flesh, as MP has laid it out, handles them very well. Others are a variant of my flesh, just as I am variant of theirs. I am other to myself and that is why I have an understanding of others. Fine. Flesh might seem to imply a kind of reciprocal ethics of care, since what I do to another I do to my own flesh, but it doesn't explain how or why variants of the world's flesh can turn against each other in hatred. The implication, from MP's engagement with psychoanalysis, would be that aggression towards others is a kind of misrecognition of the other, a failure to incorporate them into oneself (and concomitantly, a fear of being incorporated by the other). And what about non-reciprocal relationships, relationships not based off of a mirror image but instead based off of a parasite and its host, or two enemies, or--escaping the dyadic relationship structure altogether, a triad? A quartet? An n+1? The flesh is the model of the primary narcissism of the infant-mother enmeshment (and of the self-other indistinction more generally) which splits into two poles in individuated adult life. Flesh can contain undifferentiated oceanic feeling and alienated subjectivity, since it is always a being in-division, always moving away from itself by folding back towards itself, since, being double-sided, it is already a one-which-is-two and a two-which-is-one. But MP's emphasis on flesh is nearly always in the sense of a return to a movement of in-division. Even though the flesh is always moving away from oceanic feeling, it is never too far away, and it's probably the closest anyone can get without disappearing. MP was responding to the individualism and alienation which Cartesian thought served to the world, and flesh means that we are never alone (or ever fully ourselves, for that matter). But MP's emphasis on the meaningful oneness of self and world can make flesh feel like a retreat from a fragmented world, more like a new age spirituality ot a psychotherapeutic stress management technique than a truly philosophical way of engaging with the world, with all of its contingencies, anxieties, disparate parts, and senselessness.
What the flesh needs in order to stay interesting is to be ripped apart, to become what Deleuze called "meat," to lack coherency, to be stifled in its movements, to rot from the inside--ultimately, it needs to fail to be universal. It needs to fail to incorporate everything into itself. It has to have an outside. What produced the flesh? What comes next? Otherwise, our coming to rest in the movement of the flesh is death by suffocation and boredom.
December 17, 2017
This is an excellent lecture course by our friend Merleau-Ponty. It is an infinitely complex work, dealing with the movement of the philosophical and scientific determination of nature, throughout history. Merleau-Ponty's scholarship is extremely rigorous, really investigating various scientists and philosophers, and expanding and contextualizing their ideas. What's most profound about this text is the fact that Merleau-Ponty wants to try and find a new way of looking at nature - one which overcomes the subjective/objective dichotomy, but rather that Nature is a horizon, an opening by which we relate to and comport ourselves towards. We identify with it. We are inseparable from it.
February 8, 2016
Merleau-Ponty's lectures are an attempt to understand human being as an insertion in the Being of the natural world. As with all of the collected lecture books one wishes that there was more by way of explanation and explication from Merleau-Ponty. However, for the patient reader there is a great deal of fantastic philosophy.
September 26, 2008
very interesting. obviously, the quality of the notetaking varies across the series, which is a shame. the most interesting material pertains to whitehead's lectures on the concept of nature, which are here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18835
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18835
October 2, 2014
The mind must not be considered as an impartial observer of Nature: “its awareness takes part in the process of Nature.”
February 24, 2023
La carne, antes de que sea la carne, los animales y la naturaleza. Buena vaina 10/10
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews