Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Sense and Being - (New Perspectives in Ontology) by Marie-Eve Morin (Hardcover)

About the Book

Marie-Eve Morin proposes a reinterpretation of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy from the perspective of realist and object-oriented tendencies in contemporary philosophy. She shows how they avoid the danger, inherent in the phenomenological approach, of reducing being to sense.

Book Synopsis

Marie-Eve Morin proposes a reinterpretation of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy from the perspective of realist and object-oriented tendencies in contemporary philosophy. The realist critique of subject-centred anthropocentric thinking indicates the danger, inherent in the phenomenological approach, of reducing being to sense. Morin demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty and Nancy avoid this pitfall through the development of ontologies that respect the materiality and exteriority of what exists without reaffirming the Cartesian divide between mind and world.

From the Back Cover

Marie-Eve Morin proposes a reinterpretation of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy from the perspective of realist and object-oriented tendencies in contemporary philosophy. The realist critique of subject-centred anthropocentric thinking indicates the danger, inherent in the phenomenological approach, of reducing being to sense. Morin demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty and Nancy avoid this pitfall through the development of ontologies that respect the materiality and exteriority of what exists without reaffirming the Cartesian divide between mind and world. Morin lays out the parameters of this philosophical approach which operates outside of Cartesian dualism. She orients her analysis around three ideas where Merleau-Ponty's and Nancy's thinking intersect: Body, Thing, Being. Each time, she tracks the role of difference or spacing within sensing and sense-making and concludes that their respective conceptions - as encroachment and promiscuity or as unpassable limit - may provide counterweights to each other. Marie-Eve Morin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

Review Quotes

This book performs work that has not yet been done and that is really very important in understanding French phenomenology, its legacy, and its relation to Nancy, a key contemporary thinker. Written with extraordinary rigour, it is a major contribution to thinking about philosophical materialism and realism in the wake of phenomenology and deconstruction.

--Ian James, University of Cambridge

About the Author

Marie-Eve Morin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. She is the author of many articles on Derrida, Heidegger, Nancy, Sartre, Latour, and Sloterdijk. She is also the author of Jean-Luc Nancy (Polity, 2012) and is the co-editor, with Peter Gratton, of The Nancy Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Politics, Art, and Sense (SUNY, 2012). She is editor of Continental Realism and its Discontents (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).