During this period he was working on his doctoral thesis, which became his first book, the structure of behavior, published during the german occupation in 1942. Since this structure is visible from the outside and for the spectator at the same time as from within and for the actor, another person is in principle accessible to me as i am to myself and we are. The structure of behaviour marxists internet archive. In respect to gestalt psychology, in the structure of behavior, he refutes the idea.
His work the structure of behavior, although centering on the body, presented an interpretation of the distinctions among the mental, the vital. At a time when the focus of much of contemporary philosophy was. The structure of behaviour maurice merleauponty download. Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. However, it was present from the very beginning, as evidenced bythe structure of behavior. A read is counted each time someone views a publication summary such as the title, abstract, and list of authors, clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the fulltext. This paper outlines the earliest writings of maurice merleauponty. Maurice merleauponty stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. The structure of behavior by maurice merleauponty merleauponty on aphasia the paranoidschizoid and depressive positions in the psychogenesis of the self by brent dean robbins. Maurice jean jacques merleauponty 19081961, french philosopher. This toc is more detailed than the one provided in a.
But the resulting defects were not exclusively visual, and merleauponty concentrates mainly on schneiders body motility. Merleaupontys notion of the primacy of perception and his claim that the end of a philosophy is the account of its beginning are woven throughout the lectures. This attempt continues in phenomenology of perception 1945 and is sharpened in his exploration of literary, scientific, and philosophical expression during the writing of the prose of the world ca. In the recent wave of interest devoted to questions of nature and animality in merleaupontys philosophy, the contribution of his first book,the structure of behavior, has been entirely overlooked.
Maurice merleauponty was born on march 14, 1908, in rochefortsurmer, france. Phenomenology of perception, which merleauponty completed as his second. To be cle ar, merleauponty is not endorsing a b rand of crude behaviorism according to which mental phenomena like. The aim of merleaupontys philosophy is to take us behind fixed concepts into the living experience that gives rise to them.
As with many of his generation, merleauponty lost his father to the war. Already in the structure of behavior 19381942, merleauponty struggles to define the role of language in phenomenology. Maurice merleauponty the structure of behavior, trans. The psychological interpretation is supported also by the fact that the phenomenology of perception follows and is clearly continuous with merleaupontys earlier work, the structure of behaviour, which provides a close examination of neurophysiological and functional theories of. Merleaupontys the structure of behavior is a dense text book on clinical biology. Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, phenomenology of perception is merleaupontys most famous work. Though greatly influenced by the work of edmund husserl, merleauponty rejected his theory. File history click on a datetime to view the file as it appeared at that time. In emphasizing the bodys dynamic behavior as central to epistemological investigationa move seen as early as his 1942 work the structure of behavior merleauponty continued the work of his predecessors in returning to twentieth century philosophy the central role of embodiment in philosophy and psychology alike the latter effort being. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, and politics.
Merleauponty was a phenomenologist in the tradition of husserl and heidegger. Pdf expression and the structure of behavior researchgate. Maurice merleauponty french philosopher britannica. Yet merleauponty appreciates the essentially incorporated structure of perception in a way that husserl does not. Merleau ponty maurice the structure of behaviour 1963. Maurice merleauponty notes stanford encyclopedia of. He has only thrown in one or two references to inauthentic human behavior. Drawing on case studies such as braindamaged patients from the first world war, merleauponty brilliantly. For him, expression is a category of human behavior and existence much broader than language alone. The structure of behavior by maurice merleauponty, 9780820701639, available at book depository with free delivery worldwide. The path merleauponty follows to phenomenology, especially in the structure of behavior, is, however, unique.
Following the work of edmund husserl, merleaupontys project is to reveal the phenomenological structure of perception. Phenomenology as a general approach to philosophical questions begins with the work of. Phenomenology of perception download pdfepub ebook. This world which we are to rediscover is the world of perception, which is the world as we perceive it, the perceived world le monde percu as it is often called. Speech is a way of tearing out a meaning from an undivided whole. Phenomenology as a general approach to philosophical questions begins with the work of husserl. Merleauponty and the phenomenology of the body 4 by a shellsplinter that penetrated the occipital region of the cortex, normally regarded as the centre of certain forms of visual processing. Higher forms of behavior pavlovs reflexology and its postulates the central sector of behavior and the problem of localizations the structures of behavior conclusion iii. One has to be astonished at the range of his scholarship having read his books on other subjects. Merleauponty was also affected by his reading of heideggers book. Merleauponty is far better known for his second book, the monumental phenomenology of perception.
The structure of behavior is an earlier stab at the same themes, and its philosophical views are less developed than on the latter work. The mental, we have said, is reducible to the structure of behaviour. Support the sep pdfs for sep friends make a donation sepia for libraries. Merleauponty explains that habitual behavior arises on the basis of a set of situations and responses that, despite not being identical, constitute a community of meaning cf.
Important recent studies on merleaupontys general theory of expression and its application to literature and the arts include carbone 2015, kaushik 20, landes 20, wiskus 20, johnson 2010. Phenomenology as a general approach to philosophical questions. Structureis never mentioned, for example, in david abramsthe spell of the sensuous, the bestknown work on merleauponty and environmental thought, and it receives no more. Thus does maurice merleauponty describe speech in this collection of his important writings on the philosophy of expression, composed during the last decade of his life. The first involves an intentional relation to the object that is essentially cognitive or can. It is to escape the rationalism of descartes by considering the world of science, with its formal, determined structures, not the true and ultimate world, but as secondary and derived, as dependent upon the lived experience that precedes. For salliss part, these lectures are foundational for his extended engagement with merleaupontys the visible and the invisible, which was published in salliss phenomenology and. By behavior he is mostly talking about animal behavior.
For many years now, merleauponty has been known as one of the great existentialists in the. Pdf phenomenological reduction in merleaupontys the. Perhaps his most lasting contribution to the interpretation of human existence was his formulation of a positive philosophical approach to psychology. In this essay, i discuss how maurice merleaupontys phenomenology concretizes our understanding of intentionality by rooting it in the body and in the senses in particular. This is possible because the body understands the situation in the face of which it must act.
Besides being influenced by edmund husserl and martin heidegger, merleauponty assimilated the contributions of experimental philosophy and gestalt psychology to focus on perception and behavior. Does this make it optional reading for those seeking to understand merleauponty. The structure of behavior maurice merleauponty duquesne. Landes universite laval, quebec on his book merleauponty and the paradoxes of. In the structure of behavior, merleauponty examines such psychological movements as behaviorism and gestalta theory concerned with the human perception of stimuli organized into patternswith regard to plant, animal, and human behavior. The human order introduction structure in physics vital structures the human order conclusion iv. Johnson 1993 collects significant classic essays on these themes. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since plato. Merleaupontys first book, the structure of behavior sc, resumes the. The work established merleauponty as the preeminent philosopher of the body, and is considered a major statement of french existentialism. Merleauponty on the body sean dorrance kelly abstract the french philosopher maurice merleauponty claims that there are two distinct ways in which we can understand the place of an object when we are visually apprehending it. For merleauponty, that is, the body plays a constitutive role in experience precisely by. In what follows i attempt to sketch out a version of polyintentionality that i find implicit in merleaupontys chapter sensing in his phenomenology of perception. Fishers english translation, and lays out the structure.