Argues that standard interpretations of Merleau-Ponty's criticisms of Sartrean freedom fail and presents an alternative interpretation that argues that the fundamental issue concerns their different theories of time.

Responds to a paper delivered by Ladelle McWhorter at the Spindel Conference. Argues that we must be more careful in distinguishing Foucault's thought from feminist criticism.

Beauvoir and Merleau‐Ponty both recognize human freedom as fully situated and never total. Yet the concept of freedom receives radically different treatments and emphases in their work. Beauvoir never ceases to tout the importance of freedom to human existence, and to use it as the basis for an ethics of authenticity. Merleau‐Ponty offers only one extended treatment of the concept of freedom and appears skeptical of authenticity. After arguing that their views on both freedom and authenticity are aligned, this chapter (...) argues that the different weight placed on freedom and authenticity emerges from differences in their social ontology. (shrink)

"Knowledge of self, knowledge of others, error and the place of consciousness" examines texts and problems from the phenomenological tradition to show that the other does not present her/himself as a consciousness enclosed in a merely material body. I discuss Merleau-Ponty''s attempt to supplant this view with the view that the other is always seen as an "incarnate consciousness" - a unity of mind and body in activity. This view faces a difficulty in that it seems to collapse the distinction (...) between one''s own understanding of one''s behavior and the understanding which another might have of this same behavior. In response to this objection, I study how the meaning of people''s behaviors are settled in dialogue. I argue that the meanings that an actor gives to her or his behavior cannot rest entirely with that person, nor are they determined solely by the interpreter, but instead develop in the interaction between the actor and the interpreter. (shrink)

This essay pushes the ontological implications of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception to their limit. While everybody knows he used Gestaltist notions to displace atomistic ontologies,1 I completely subordinate the phenomenological to the ontological, so that his deployment of Form from The Structure of Behavior becomes the fundamental maneuver of the Phenomenology. The more traditional concerns with subject/object and mind/body dualities are then both secondary to and solved by this use of Form, and the book becomes not so much a phenomenology (...) as an explicitly new metaphysics.Merleau-Ponty introduces the living body as être au monde amid his discussion of the phantom limb and initially compares it neither .. (shrink)