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Chapter 4 - Merleau-Ponty and the Indeterminacy of Perception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2022

Henry Somers-Hall
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
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Summary

Chapter 4 develops Merleau-Ponty’s perspectival account of experience. It shows how Merleau-Ponty’s claim that perception has a different structure to what he calls ‘objective thought’ can be derived from his interpretation of Kant’s paradox of symmetrical objects. It looks at how this difference in structure leads to Merleau-Ponty’s distinctive accounts of perspectival depth and orientation in space, before returning to Kant to show how Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception as having a figure-background structure leads to substantial divergences from Kant’s account of the constitution of the object (in doing so, it reconstructs a sustained argument against Kant’s transcendental deduction from fragmentary comments throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work). It also shows that the model of determination developed by Merleau-Ponty, while relying on context, differs significantly from Hegel’s account of determination, and supplements deficiencies in Sartre’s account.

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Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy
A New Reading of Six Thinkers
, pp. 114 - 147
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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