- The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Aristotle <i>in</i> Phenomenology
- Descartes’ Notion of the Mind–Body Union and its Phenomenological Expositions
- Kant, Neo-Kantianism, and Phenomenology
- Phenomenology and German Idealism
- Phenomenology and Descriptive Psychology: Brentano, Stumpf, Husserl
- Husserl’s Early Period: Juvenilia and the <i>Logical Investigations</i>
- Husserl’s Middle Period and the Development of his Ethics
- Pre-Predicative Experience and Life-World: Two Distinct Projects in Husserl’s Late Phenomenology
- Scheler on the Moral and Political Significance of the Emotions
- Edith Stein’s Challenge to Sense-Making: The Role of the Lived Body, Psyche, and Spirit
- The Early Heidegger’s Phenomenology
- The Middle Heidegger’s Phenomenological Metaphysics
- Phenomenology and Ontology in the Later Heidegger
- Schutz and Gurwitsch on Agency
- Sartre’s Transcendental Phenomenology
- The Later Sartre: From Phenomenology to Hermeneutics to Dialectic and Back
- Simone de Beauvoir: Philosopher, Author, Feminist
- Science in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology: From the Early Work to the Later Philosophy
- Merleau-Ponty from 1945 to 1952: The Ontological Weight of Perception and the Transcendental Force of Description
- Rereading the Later Merleau-Ponty in the Light of his Unpublished Work
- Jan Patočka’s Philosophical Legacy
- An Immense Power: The Three Phenomenological Insights Supporting Derridean Deconstruction
- When Alterity Becomes Proximity: Levinas’s Path
- Turn to Excess: The Development of Phenomenology in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought
- Phenomenological Methodology
- Subjectivity: From Husserl to his Followers (and Back Again)
- The Inquietude of Time and the Instance of Eternity: Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas
- Embodiment and Bodily Becoming
- From the Origin of Spatiality to a Variety of Spaces
- Intentionality: Lived Experience, Bodily Comportment, and the Horizon of the World
- Practical Intentionality: From Brentano to the Phenomenology of the Munich and Göttingen Circles
- Ideal Verificationism and Perceptual Faith: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on Perceptual Knowledge
- Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty on the World of Experience
- Imagination De-Naturalized: Phantasy, the Imaginary, and Imaginative Ontology
- Value, Freedom, Responsibility: Central Themes in Phenomenological Ethics
- Historicity and the Hermeneutic Predicament: From Yorck to Derrida
- Intersubjectivity, Sociality, Community: The Contribution of the Early Phenomenologists
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
The chapter clarifies the connections between Descartes’ discussion of the mind–body union and classical phenomenology of embodiment, as developed by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. It argues that the perplexing twofoldness of Descartes’ account of the mind–body union—interactionistic on the one hand, and holistic on the other—can be explicated and made coherent by phenomenological analyses of the two different attitudes that we can take toward human beings: the naturalistic and the personalistic. In the naturalistic attitude, the human being is understood as a two-layered psycho-physical complex, in which mental states and faculties are founded on the material basis of the body. In the personalistic attitude, the human being forms an expressive whole in which the spiritual and the sensible-material are intertwined. The chapter ends with a discussion of the most important similarities and differences between Descartes’ and Husserl’s conceptions of philosophy as a radical science.
Keywords: Descartes, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, mind–body relation, materialism, naturalism, interactionism, holism, perception, epistemology
Sara Heinämaa is academy professor of the Academy of Finland, leading a five-year research project in phenomenology of normality. Heinämaa holds a chair for philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and operates as the director of the interdisciplinary research community Subjectivity, Historicity, Communality (SHC). She is the author of numerous articles on phenomenology and of Toward A Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (2003) and Birth, Death, and Femininity (with Schott et al., 2010). She is editor of Phenomenology and the Transcendental (with Hartimo and Miettinen, 2014) and New Perspectives on Aristotelianism and its Critics (with Mäkinen and Tuominen, 2015). She is also co-founder of The Nordic Society for Phenomenology (NoSP) and has served two terms as its president.
Timo Kaitaro, PhD, is a neuropsychologist and adjunct professor (docent) of the history of philosophy at the University of Helsinki. His publications include Diderot’s Holism: Philosophical Anti-Reductionism and its Medical Background (1997) and Le Surréalisme. Pour un realisme sans rivage (2008) and numerous articles on the French Enlightenment, the history of neurosciences, and the philosophy of surrealism. He has a long-standing interest in the history of the diverse ways in which the brain and the human body have been described and modeled in terms of technological and semiotic artefacts.
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- The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Aristotle <i>in</i> Phenomenology
- Descartes’ Notion of the Mind–Body Union and its Phenomenological Expositions
- Kant, Neo-Kantianism, and Phenomenology
- Phenomenology and German Idealism
- Phenomenology and Descriptive Psychology: Brentano, Stumpf, Husserl
- Husserl’s Early Period: Juvenilia and the <i>Logical Investigations</i>
- Husserl’s Middle Period and the Development of his Ethics
- Pre-Predicative Experience and Life-World: Two Distinct Projects in Husserl’s Late Phenomenology
- Scheler on the Moral and Political Significance of the Emotions
- Edith Stein’s Challenge to Sense-Making: The Role of the Lived Body, Psyche, and Spirit
- The Early Heidegger’s Phenomenology
- The Middle Heidegger’s Phenomenological Metaphysics
- Phenomenology and Ontology in the Later Heidegger
- Schutz and Gurwitsch on Agency
- Sartre’s Transcendental Phenomenology
- The Later Sartre: From Phenomenology to Hermeneutics to Dialectic and Back
- Simone de Beauvoir: Philosopher, Author, Feminist
- Science in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology: From the Early Work to the Later Philosophy
- Merleau-Ponty from 1945 to 1952: The Ontological Weight of Perception and the Transcendental Force of Description
- Rereading the Later Merleau-Ponty in the Light of his Unpublished Work
- Jan Patočka’s Philosophical Legacy
- An Immense Power: The Three Phenomenological Insights Supporting Derridean Deconstruction
- When Alterity Becomes Proximity: Levinas’s Path
- Turn to Excess: The Development of Phenomenology in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought
- Phenomenological Methodology
- Subjectivity: From Husserl to his Followers (and Back Again)
- The Inquietude of Time and the Instance of Eternity: Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas
- Embodiment and Bodily Becoming
- From the Origin of Spatiality to a Variety of Spaces
- Intentionality: Lived Experience, Bodily Comportment, and the Horizon of the World
- Practical Intentionality: From Brentano to the Phenomenology of the Munich and Göttingen Circles
- Ideal Verificationism and Perceptual Faith: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on Perceptual Knowledge
- Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty on the World of Experience
- Imagination De-Naturalized: Phantasy, the Imaginary, and Imaginative Ontology
- Value, Freedom, Responsibility: Central Themes in Phenomenological Ethics
- Historicity and the Hermeneutic Predicament: From Yorck to Derrida
- Intersubjectivity, Sociality, Community: The Contribution of the Early Phenomenologists
- Index