Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture
- 2 Sensation, Judgment, and the Phenomenal Field
- 3 Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty
- 4 Motives, Reasons, and Causes
- 5 Merleau-Ponty and Recent Cognitive Science
- 6 The Silent, Limping Body of Philosophy
- 7 Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche
- 8 A Phenomenology of Life
- 9 The Embryology of the (In)visible
- 10 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Conception of Science
- 11 Between Philosophy and Art
- 12 Understanding the Engaged Philosopher: On Politics, Philosophy, and Art
- 13 Thinking Politics
- References
- Index
4 - Motives, Reasons, and Causes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture
- 2 Sensation, Judgment, and the Phenomenal Field
- 3 Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty
- 4 Motives, Reasons, and Causes
- 5 Merleau-Ponty and Recent Cognitive Science
- 6 The Silent, Limping Body of Philosophy
- 7 Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche
- 8 A Phenomenology of Life
- 9 The Embryology of the (In)visible
- 10 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Conception of Science
- 11 Between Philosophy and Art
- 12 Understanding the Engaged Philosopher: On Politics, Philosophy, and Art
- 13 Thinking Politics
- References
- Index
Summary
A measure of the remarkable influence of Cartesian dualismis found in the fact that it often constrains even the ways in which it is rejected. Few accept, it is true, the basic picture of a dualism of mental and physical substances. A dualism still shapes the philosophy of mind, however – for instance, in that almost everyone sees as central the task of figuring out the relation between mind and body. It sometimes seems as if the only possible accounts of human beings consist in either giving a mental or a physical description, or explaining how the mental descriptions and the physical descriptions relate to one another.
Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, argues that no such variation, played out on the Cartesian register, will ever account for the human mode of being in the world. “There are two classical views,” he notes;
one treats man as the result of the physical, physiological, and sociological influences which shape him from outside and make him one thing among many; the other consists of recognizing an acosmic freedom in him, insofar as he is spirit and represents to himself the very causes which supposedly act upon him.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty , pp. 111 - 128Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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