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134-427: At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in the human experience of the world . Merleau-Ponty understands perception to be an ongoing dialogue between one's lived body and the world which it perceives, in which perceivers passively and actively strive to express the perceived world in concert with others. He was the only major phenomenologist of

268-591: A M.A. thesis) from the University of Paris , on the basis of the (now-lost) thesis La Notion de multiple intelligible chez Plotin (" Plotinus 's Notion of the Intelligible Many"), directed by Émile Bréhier . He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930. Merleau-Ponty was raised as a Roman Catholic . He was friends with the Christian existentialist author and philosopher Gabriel Marcel and wrote articles for

402-480: A secular theory of socialism in The Communist Manifesto . Starting in the late 19th century and early 20th century, some began to take on the view that genuine Christianity had much in common with a leftist perspective. From St. Augustine of Hippo 's City of God through St. Thomas More 's Utopia , major Christian writers had expounded upon views that socialists found agreeable. Of major interest

536-533: A subconscious and instinctive level. Social perception is the part of perception that allows people to understand the individuals and groups of their social world. Thus, it is an element of social cognition . Speech perception is the process by which spoken language is heard, interpreted and understood. Research in this field seeks to understand how human listeners recognize the sound of speech (or phonetics ) and use such information to understand spoken language. Listeners manage to perceive words across

670-479: A dimension of expressivity which proves to be fundamental to the constitution of the ego is one of the conclusions of The Structure of Behaviour that is constantly reiterated in Merleau-Ponty's later works. Following this theme of expressivity, he goes on to examine how an incarnate subject is in a position to undertake actions that transcend the organic level of the body, such as in intellectual operations and

804-579: A faith-based social activism, promoted by movements such as Christian socialism . In the United States during this period, Episcopalians and Congregationalists generally tended to be the most liberal, both in theological interpretation and in their adherence to the Social Gospel. In Canada, a coalition of liberal Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians founded the United Church of Canada , one of

938-425: A higher level of analysis. Thus, Merleau-Ponty does not postulate that "all consciousness is consciousness of something", which supposes at the outset a noetic-noematic ground. Instead, he develops the thesis according to which "all consciousness is perceptual consciousness". In doing so, he establishes a significant turn in the development of phenomenology, indicating that its conceptualisations should be re-examined in

1072-515: A label such as Christian left represents an approximation, including within it groups and persons holding many diverse viewpoints. The term left-wing might encompass a number of values, some of which may or may not be held by different Christian movements and individuals. As the unofficial title of a loose association of believers, it provides a clear distinction from the more commonly known Christian right , or religious right, and from its key leaders and political views. The Christian left does not hold

1206-505: A leftist character. Some among the Christian left, as well as some non-religious socialists, find support for anarchism , communism , and socialism in the Gospels, for example Mikhail Gorbachev citing Jesus as "the first socialist". The Christian left is a broad category that includes Christian socialism, as well as Christians who would not identify themselves as socialists. For much of

1340-413: A model of perception, in which people put "together the information contained in" a target and a situation to form "perceptions of ourselves and others based on social categories." This model is composed of three states: According to Alan Saks and Gary Johns, there are three components to perception: Stimuli are not necessarily translated into a percept and rarely does a single stimulus translate into

1474-638: A more favourable attitude towards Soviet communism . Merleau-Ponty was subsequently active in the French non-communist left and in particular in the Union of the Democratic Forces . Merleau-Ponty died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 at age 53, apparently while preparing for a class on René Descartes , leaving an unfinished manuscript which was posthumously published in 1964, along with a selection of Merleau-Ponty's working notes, by Claude Lefort as The Visible and

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1608-523: A movement in line with their faith. The term social justice was coined in the 1840s by Luigi Taparelli , an Italian Catholic scholar of the Society of Jesus , who was inspired by the writings of Thomas Aquinas . The Christian left holds that social justice, renunciation of power, humility, forgiveness, and private observation of prayer (as in Matthew 6:5–6 ) as opposed to publicly mandated prayer, are mandated by

1742-426: A new Gestalt oriented toward a particular object. Because the bodily involvement with things is always provisional and indeterminate, meaningful things are encountered in a unified though ever open-ended world. From the time of writing Structure of Behaviour and Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty wanted to show, in opposition to the idea that drove the tradition beginning with John Locke , that perception

1876-407: A percept. An ambiguous stimulus may sometimes be transduced into one or more percepts, experienced randomly, one at a time, in a process termed multistable perception . The same stimuli, or absence of them, may result in different percepts depending on subject's culture and previous experiences. Ambiguous figures demonstrate that a single stimulus can result in more than one percept. For example,

2010-410: A physical standpoint. Smell is also a very interactive sense as scientists have begun to observe that olfaction comes into contact with the other sense in unexpected ways. It is also the most primal of the senses, as it is known to be the first indicator of safety or danger, therefore being the sense that drives the most basic of human survival skills. As such, it can be a catalyst for human behavior on

2144-419: A preacher. And what I'm doing in this struggle, along with many others, grows out of my feeling that the preacher must be concerned about the whole man. The Christian left generally approaches homosexuality differently from some other Christian political groups. This approach can be driven by focusing on issues differently despite holding similar religious views, or by holding different religious ideas. Those in

2278-438: A rereading of Merleau-Ponty's influence on Simone de Beauvoir. (She has also challenged Dreyfus's reading of Merleau-Ponty as behaviorist, and as neglecting the importance of the phenomenological reduction to Merleau-Ponty's thought.) Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body has also been taken up by Iris Young in her essay " Throwing Like a Girl ," and its follow-up, "'Throwing Like a Girl': Twenty Years Later". Young analyzes

2412-494: A wide range of conditions, as the sound of a word can vary widely according to words that surround it and the tempo of the speech, as well as the physical characteristics, accent , tone , and mood of the speaker. Reverberation , signifying the persistence of sound after the sound is produced, can also have a considerable impact on perception. Experiments have shown that people automatically compensate for this effect when hearing speech. The process of perceiving speech begins at

2546-428: A word with a cough-like sound. His subjects restored the missing speech sound perceptually without any difficulty. Moreover, they were not able to accurately identify which phoneme had even been disturbed. Facial perception refers to cognitive processes specialized in handling human faces (including perceiving the identity of an individual) and facial expressions (such as emotional cues.) The somatosensory cortex

2680-453: Is active exploration . The concept of haptic perception is related to the concept of extended physiological proprioception according to which, when using a tool such as a stick, perceptual experience is transparently transferred to the end of the tool. Taste (formally known as gustation ) is the ability to perceive the flavor of substances, including, but not limited to, food . Humans receive tastes through sensory organs concentrated on

2814-548: Is "all consciousness is consciousness of something", which implies a distinction between "acts of thought" (the noesis ) and "intentional objects of thought" (the noema ). Thus, the correlation between noesis and noema becomes the first step in the constitution of analyses of consciousness. However, in studying the posthumous manuscripts of Husserl, who remained one of his major influences, Merleau-Ponty remarked that, in their evolution, Husserl's work brings to light phenomena which are not assimilable to noesis–noema correlation. This

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2948-452: Is a measurable difference between the making of a decision and the feeling of agency. Through methods such as the Libet experiment , a gap of half a second or more can be detected from the time when there are detectable neurological signs of a decision having been made to the time when the subject actually becomes conscious of the decision. There are also experiments in which an illusion of agency

3082-458: Is a part of the brain that receives and encodes sensory information from receptors of the entire body. Affective touch is a type of sensory information that elicits an emotional reaction and is usually social in nature. Such information is actually coded differently than other sensory information. Though the intensity of affective touch is still encoded in the primary somatosensory cortex, the feeling of pleasantness associated with affective touch

3216-439: Is activated more in the anterior cingulate cortex . Increased blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) contrast imaging, identified during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), shows that signals in the anterior cingulate cortex, as well as the prefrontal cortex , are highly correlated with pleasantness scores of affective touch. Inhibitory transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the primary somatosensory cortex inhibits

3350-645: Is anti-individualistic. In the preface to his Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty presents a phenomenological objection to positivism : that it can reveal nothing about human subjectivity. All that a scientific text can explain is the particular individual experience of that scientist, which cannot be transcended. For Merleau-Ponty, science neglects the depth and profundity of the phenomena that it endeavors to explain. Merleau-Ponty understood science to be an ex post facto abstraction. Causal and physiological accounts of perception, for example, explain perception in terms that are arrived at only after abstracting from

3484-452: Is born of the pre-conscious style of the world, of Nature. In his essay Cézanne's Doubt , in which he identifies Paul Cézanne 's impressionistic theory of painting as analogous to his own concept of radical reflection, the attempt to return to, and reflect on, prereflective consciousness, Merleau-Ponty identifies science as the opposite of art. In Merleau-Ponty's account, whereas art is an attempt to capture an individual's perception, science

3618-429: Is called the proximal stimulus . These neural signals are then transmitted to the brain and processed. The resulting mental re-creation of the distal stimulus is the percept . To explain the process of perception, an example could be an ordinary shoe. The shoe itself is the distal stimulus. When light from the shoe enters a person's eye and stimulates the retina, that stimulation is the proximal stimulus. The image of

3752-434: Is exploited in human technologies such as camouflage and biological mimicry . For example, the wings of European peacock butterflies bear eyespots that birds respond to as though they were the eyes of a dangerous predator. There is also evidence that the brain in some ways operates on a slight "delay" in order to allow nerve impulses from distant parts of the body to be integrated into simultaneous signals. Perception

3886-505: Is induced in psychologically normal subjects. In 1999, psychologists Wegner and Wheatley gave subjects instructions to move a mouse around a scene and point to an image about once every thirty seconds. However, a second person—acting as a test subject but actually a confederate—had their hand on the mouse at the same time, and controlled some of the movement. Experimenters were able to arrange for subjects to perceive certain "forced stops" as if they were their own choice. Recognition memory

4020-519: Is just political action to be decided? Merleau-Ponty maintained an engaged though critical relationship to the Marxist left until the end of his life, particularly during his time as the political editor of the journal Les Temps modernes . Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908 in Rochefort-sur-Mer , Charente-Inférieure (now Charente-Maritime), France . His father died in 1913 when Merleau-Ponty

4154-414: Is manifest precisely by presenting itself to a range of possible views. The object of perception is immanently tied to its background—to the nexus of meaningful relations among objects within the world. Because the object is inextricably within the world of meaningful relations, each object reflects the other (much in the style of Leibniz's monads ). Through involvement in the world – being-in-the-world –

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4288-501: Is needed to associate the feeling with a specific source. Sexual stimulation is any stimulus (including bodily contact) that leads to, enhances, and maintains sexual arousal , possibly even leading to orgasm . Distinct from the general sense of touch , sexual stimulation is strongly tied to hormonal activity and chemical triggers in the body. Although sexual arousal may arise without physical stimulation , achieving orgasm usually requires physical sexual stimulation (stimulation of

4422-415: Is not nature or the biosphere conceived as a complex set of objects and objective processes, but rather "the biosphere as it is experienced and lived from within by the intelligent body — by the attentive human animal who is entirely a part of the world that he or she experiences. Merleau-Ponty's ecophenemonology with its emphasis on holistic dialog within the larger-than-human world also has implications for

4556-450: Is not necessarily uni-directional. Higher-level language processes connected with morphology , syntax , and/or semantics may also interact with basic speech perception processes to aid in recognition of speech sounds. It may be the case that it is not necessary (maybe not even possible) for a listener to recognize phonemes before recognizing higher units, such as words. In an experiment, professor Richard M. Warren replaced one phoneme of

4690-518: Is not only the passive receipt of these signals , but it is also shaped by the recipient's learning , memory , expectation , and attention . Sensory input is a process that transforms this low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition ). The following process connects a person's concepts and expectations (or knowledge ) with restorative and selective mechanisms, such as attention , that influence perception. Perception depends on complex functions of

4824-429: Is one of the oldest fields in psychology. The oldest quantitative laws in psychology are Weber's law , which states that the smallest noticeable difference in stimulus intensity is proportional to the intensity of the reference; and Fechner's law , which quantifies the relationship between the intensity of the physical stimulus and its perceptual counterpart (e.g., testing how much darker a computer screen can get before

4958-544: Is particularly the case when one attends to the phenomena of the body (which is at once body-subject and body-object), subjective time (the consciousness of time is neither an act of consciousness nor an object of thought) and the other (the first considerations of the other in Husserl led to solipsism ). The distinction between "acts of thought" (noesis) and " intentional objects of thought" (noema) does not seem, therefore, to constitute an irreducible ground. It appears rather at

5092-637: Is situated in a kind of middle ground of relationality, a space that is neither purely objective, because it is reciprocally constituted by a diversity of lived experiences motivating the movements of countless organisms, nor purely subjective, because it is nonetheless a field of material relationships between bodies. It is governed exclusively neither by causality, nor by intentionality. In this space of in-betweenness, phenomenology can overcome its inaugural opposition to naturalism. David Abram explains Merleau-Ponty's concept of "flesh" ( chair ) as "the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both

5226-403: Is sometimes divided into two functions by neuroscientists: familiarity and recollection . A strong sense of familiarity can occur without any recollection, for example in cases of deja vu . The temporal lobe (specifically the perirhinal cortex ) responds differently to stimuli that feel novel compared to stimuli that feel familiar. Firing rates in the perirhinal cortex are connected with

5360-402: Is strongly influenced by smell. The process of perception begins with an object in the real world, known as the distal stimulus or distal object . By means of light, sound, or another physical process, the object stimulates the body's sensory organs. These sensory organs transform the input energy into neural activity—a process called transduction . This raw pattern of neural activity

5494-419: Is the (Catholic and progressive evangelical) consistent life ethic , which sees opposition to capital punishment , militarism , euthanasia , abortion and the global unequal distribution of wealth as being related. It is an idea with certain concepts shared by Abrahamic religions as well as some Buddhists , Hindus , and members of other religions. The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago developed

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5628-472: Is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system , which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system . Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye ; smell is mediated by odor molecules ; and hearing involves pressure waves . Perception

5762-401: Is the process of absorbing molecules through olfactory organs , which are absorbed by humans through the nose . These molecules diffuse through a thick layer of mucus ; come into contact with one of thousands of cilia that are projected from sensory neurons; and are then absorbed into a receptor (one of 347 or so). It is this process that causes humans to understand the concept of smell from

5896-444: Is these uses of the notion of style that lead Malraux to postulate a cleavage between the objectivity of Italian Renaissance painting and the subjectivity of painting in his own time, a conclusion that Merleau-Ponty disputes. According to Merleau-Ponty, it is important to consider the heart of this problematic, by recognizing that style is first of all a demand owed to the primacy of perception, which also implies taking into consideration

6030-501: Is used, on the contrary, in a very metaphysical sense (in Merleau-Ponty's opinion, a mystical sense), in which style is connected with a conception of an "über-artist" expressing "the Spirit of Painting". Finally, it sometimes is reduced to simply designating a categorization of an artistic school or movement. (However, this account of Malraux's notion of style—a key element in his thinking—is open to serious question.) For Merleau-Ponty, it

6164-652: The Christian leftist journal Esprit , but he left the Catholic Church in 1937 because he felt his socialist politics were not compatible with the social and political doctrine of the Catholic Church. An article published in the French newspaper Le Monde in October 2014 makes the case of recent discoveries about Merleau-Ponty's likely authorship of the novel Nord. Récit de l'arctique (Grasset, 1928). Convergent sources from close friends (Beauvoir, Elisabeth "Zaza" Lacoin) seem to leave little doubt that Jacques Heller

6298-601: The Gospel . The Bible contains accounts of Jesus repeatedly advocating for the poor and outcast over the wealthy, powerful, and religious. The Christian left maintains that such a stance is relevant and important. Adhering to the standard of " turning the other cheek ", which they believe supersedes the Old Testament law of " an eye for an eye ", the Christian left sometimes hearkens towards pacifism in opposition to policies advancing militarism . The medieval Waldensians sect had

6432-676: The Invisible . He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris with his mother Louise, his wife Suzanne and their daughter Marianne. In his Phenomenology of Perception (first published in French in 1945), Merleau-Ponty develops the concept of the body-subject ( le corps propre ) as an alternative to the Cartesian " cogito ". This distinction is especially important in that Merleau-Ponty perceives

6566-603: The Nazi forces during the liberation of Paris . After teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a chair. Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty

6700-460: The Rubin vase can be interpreted either as a vase or as two faces. The percept can bind sensations from multiple senses into a whole. A picture of a talking person on a television screen, for example, is bound to the sound of speech from speakers to form a percept of a talking person. In many ways, vision is the primary human sense. Light is taken in through each eye and focused in a way which sorts it on

6834-598: The Soviet farce trials and political violence for progressive ends in general in the work Humanism and Terror in 1947. Kuby states that, about three years after that, however, he renounced his earlier support for political violence, rejected Marxism, and advocated a liberal left position in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). His friendship with Sartre and work with Les Temps modernes ended because of that, since Sartre still had

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6968-520: The Soviet farce trials . Slavoj Zizek opines that it avoids the definitive endorsement of a view on the Soviet Union , but instead engages with the Marxist theory of history as a critique of liberalism , in order to reveal an unresolved antinomy in modern politics, between humanism and terror : if human values can only be achieved through violent force, and if liberal ideas hide illiberal realities, how

7102-407: The essences of the world existentially . Consciousness , the world, and the human body as a perceiving thing are intricately intertwined and mutually "engaged". The phenomenal thing is not the unchanging object of the natural sciences , but a correlate of the human body and its sensory-motor functions. Taking up and "communing with" (Merleau-Ponty's phrase) the sensible qualities it encounters,

7236-451: The nervous system , but subjectively seems mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness . Since the rise of experimental psychology in the 19th century, psychology's understanding of perception has progressed by combining a variety of techniques. Psychophysics quantitatively describes the relationships between the physical qualities of the sensory input and perception. Sensory neuroscience studies

7370-433: The throat and lungs . In the case of visual perception, some people can see the percept shift in their mind's eye . Others, who are not picture thinkers , may not necessarily perceive the 'shape-shifting' as their world changes. This esemplastic nature has been demonstrated by an experiment that showed that ambiguous images have multiple interpretations on the perceptual level. The confusing ambiguity of perception

7504-413: The "I can" – that is, oriented towards certain projects based on capacity and habituality. Young's thesis is that in women, this intentionality is inhibited and ambivalent, rather than confident, experienced as an "I cannot". Ecophenomenology can be described as the pursuit of the relationalities of worldly engagement, both human and those of other creatures (Brown & Toadvine 2003). This engagement

7638-553: The Christian left have not only a different focus on issues from other Christian political groups, but different religious ideas as well. For example, some members of the Christian left may consider discrimination and bigotry against homosexuals to be immoral, but they differ on their views towards homosexual sex. Some believe homosexual sex to be immoral but unimportant compared with issues relating to social justice, or even matters of sexual morality involving heterosexual sex. Others assert that some homosexual practices are compatible with

7772-447: The Christian left who have similar ideas as other Christian political groups but a different focus may view Christian teachings on certain issues, such as the Bible's prohibitions against killing or criticisms of concentrations of wealth, as far more politically important than Christian teachings on social issues emphasized by the religious right , such as opposition to homosexuality. Others in

7906-431: The Christian life. Such members believe common biblical arguments used to condemn homosexuality are misinterpreted, and that biblical prohibitions of homosexual practices are actually against a specific type of homosexual sex act, i.e. pederasty , the sodomizing of young boys by older men. Thus, they hold biblical prohibitions to be irrelevant when considering modern same-sex relationships. A related strain of thought

8040-507: The Krause-Finger corpuscles found in erogenous zones of the body.) Other senses enable perception of body balance (vestibular sense ); acceleration , including gravity ; position of body parts (proprioception sense ). They can also enable perception of internal senses (interoception sense ), such as temperature, pain, suffocation , gag reflex , abdominal distension , fullness of rectum and urinary bladder , and sensations felt in

8174-604: The United States, members of the Christian Left come from a spectrum of denominations : Peace churches , elements of the Protestant mainline churches, Catholicism , and some evangelicals . Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesman and leader in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. Inspired by his Christian beliefs and

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8308-514: The Voices of Silence". In spite of certain similarities with André Malraux , Merleau-Ponty distinguishes himself from Malraux in respect to three conceptions of style, the last of which is employed in Malraux's The Voices of Silence . Merleau-Ponty remarks that in this work "style" is sometimes used by Malraux in a highly subjective sense, understood as a projection of the artist's individuality. Sometimes it

8442-451: The World , p. 10). Spoken language ( le langage parlé ), or secondary expression, returns to the speaker's linguistic baggage and cultural heritage, as well as the brute mass of relationships between signs and significations . Speaking language ( le langage parlant ), or primary expression, such as it is, is language in the production of a sense, language at the advent of a thought, at

8576-407: The anomalous word, the human readers generated an event-related electrical potential alteration of their EEG at the left occipital-temporal channel, over the left occipital lobe and temporal lobe. Hearing (or audition ) is the ability to perceive sound by detecting vibrations (i.e., sonic detection). Frequencies capable of being heard by humans are called audio or audible frequencies ,

8710-422: The body as incarnated subjectivity intentionally elaborates things within an ever-present world frame, through use of its pre-conscious, pre-predicative understanding of the world's makeup. The elaboration, however, is "inexhaustible" (the hallmark of any perception according to Merleau-Ponty). Things are that upon which the body has a "grip" ( prise ), while the grip itself is a function of human connaturality with

8844-427: The body's primordial involvement and understanding of the world and of the meanings that constitute the landscape's perceptual Gestalt . Only after an integration within the environment so as to perceive objects as such can attention be turned toward particular objects within the landscape so as to define them more clearly. This attention, however, does not operate by clarifying what is already seen, but by constructing

8978-500: The brain enable individuals to see the world around them as stable, even though the sensory information is typically incomplete and rapidly varying. Human and other animal brains are structured in a modular way , with different areas processing different kinds of sensory information. Some of these modules take the form of sensory maps , mapping some aspect of the world across part of the brain's surface. These different modules are interconnected and influence each other. For instance, taste

9112-448: The brain proper via the optic nerve. The timing of perception of a visual event, at points along the visual circuit, have been measured. A sudden alteration of light at a spot in the environment first alters photoreceptor cells in the retina , which send a signal to the retina bipolar cell layer which, in turn, can activate a retinal ganglion neuron cell. A retinal ganglion cell is a bridging neuron that connects visual retinal input to

9246-441: The brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus , is responsible for the circadian rhythm (commonly known as one's "internal clock"), while other cell clusters appear to be capable of shorter-range timekeeping, known as an ultradian rhythm . One or more dopaminergic pathways in the central nervous system appear to have a strong modulatory influence on mental chronometry , particularly interval timing. Sense of agency refers to

9380-539: The computationally complex task of separating out sources of interest, identifying them and often estimating their distance and direction. The process of recognizing objects through touch is known as haptic perception . It involves a combination of somatosensory perception of patterns on the skin surface (e.g., edges, curvature, and texture) and proprioception of hand position and conformation. People can rapidly and accurately identify three-dimensional objects by touch. This involves exploratory procedures, such as moving

9514-416: The conditions of the disadvantaged. With values stemming from egalitarianism , adherents of the Christian left consider it part of their religious duty to take actions on behalf of the oppressed. Matthew 25:31–46 , among other verses, is often cited to support this view. As nearly all major religions contain some kind of requirement to help others , adherents of various religions have cited social justice as

9648-574: The despotic leaders in Southern and Central America allied themselves with the communist opposition. However, it developed independently of and roughly simultaneously with Black theology in the U.S. and should not be confused with it. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith decided that while liberation theology is partially compatible with Catholic social teaching, certain Marxist elements of it, such as

9782-405: The development of his thought. As the course outlines of his Sorbonne lectures indicate, during this period he continues a dialogue between phenomenology and the diverse work carried out in psychology , all in order to return to the study of the acquisition of language in children, as well as to broadly take advantage of the contribution of Ferdinand de Saussure to linguistics , and to work on

9916-404: The dimensions of historicity and intersubjectivity . (However, Merleau-Ponty's reading of Malraux has been questioned in a recent major study of Malraux's theory of art which argues that Merleau-Ponty seriously misunderstood Malraux.) For Merleau-Ponty, style is born of the interaction between two or more fields of being. Rather than being exclusive to individual human consciousness, consciousness

10050-638: The dualist ontology of mind and body in Descartes, a philosopher to whom Merleau-Ponty continually returned, despite the important differences that separate them. In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty wrote: "Insofar as I have hands, feet, a body, I sustain around me intentions which are not dependent on my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way that I do not choose" (1962, p. 440). The question concerning corporeity connects also with Merleau-Ponty's reflections on space ( l'espace ) and

10184-457: The early history of anti-establishment leftist movements, such as socialism and communism , which was highly anti-clerical in the 19th century, some established churches were led by clergy who saw revolution as a threat to their status and power. The church was sometimes seen as part of the establishment. Revolutions in the United States , France and Russia were in part directed against

10318-502: The established churches, or rather their leading clergy, and instituted a separation of church and state . In the 19th century, some writers and activists developed the school of thought of Christian socialism , which infused socialist principles into Christian theology and praxis. Early socialist thinkers such as Robert Owen , Henri de Saint-Simon based their theories of socialism upon Christian principles. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels reacted against these theories by formulating

10452-401: The fact that there is an inherence of consciousness and of the body of which the analysis of perception should take account. The primacy of perception signifies a primacy of experience, so to speak, insofar as perception becomes an active and constitutive dimension. Merleau-Ponty demonstrates a corporeity of consciousness as much as an intentionality of the body, and so stands in contrast with

10586-404: The fingers over the outer surface of the object or holding the entire object in the hand. Haptic perception relies on the forces experienced during touch. Professor Gibson defined the haptic system as "the sensibility of the individual to the world adjacent to his body by use of his body." Gibson and others emphasized the close link between body movement and haptic perception, where the latter

10720-435: The first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences. It is through this engagement that his writings became influential in the project of naturalising phenomenology, in which phenomenologists use the results of psychology and cognitive science . Merleau-Ponty emphasised the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as

10854-420: The first true Christian left denominations. Later in the 20th century, liberation theology was championed by such writers as Gustavo Gutierrez and Matthew Fox . To a significant degree, the Christian left developed out of the experiences of clergy who went to do pastoral work among the working class, often beginning without any social philosophy but simply a pastoral and evangelistic concern for workers. This

10988-472: The idea for the consistent life ethic in 1983. Sojourners is particularly associated with this strand of thought. Liberation theology is a theological tradition that emerged in the developing world , primarily in Latin America . Since the 1960s, Catholic thinkers have integrated left-wing thought and Catholicism, giving rise to Liberation theology. It arose at a time when Catholic thinkers who opposed

11122-428: The inherent diversity in international political thought, the term Christian left can have different meanings and applications in different countries. While there is much overlap, the Christian left is distinct from liberal Christianity , meaning not all Christian leftists are liberal Christians and vice versa . In the United States, the Christian left usually aligns with modern liberalism and progressivism , using

11256-423: The level of the sound within the auditory signal and the process of audition . The initial auditory signal is compared with visual information—primarily lip movement—to extract acoustic cues and phonetic information. It is possible other sensory modalities are integrated at this stage as well. This speech information can then be used for higher-level language processes, such as word recognition . Speech perception

11390-432: The light of the primacy of perception, in weighing up the philosophical consequences of this thesis. Taking the study of perception as his point of departure, Merleau-Ponty was led to recognize that one's own body ( le corps propre ) is not only a thing, a potential object of study for science, but is also a permanent condition of experience , a constituent of the perceptual openness to the world. He therefore underlines

11524-490: The moment where it makes itself an advent of sense. It is speaking language, that is to say, primary expression, that interests Merleau-Ponty and which keeps his attention through his treatment of the nature of production and the reception of expressions, a subject which also overlaps with an analysis of action, of intentionality, of perception, as well as the links between freedom and external conditions. The notion of style occupies an important place in "Indirect Language and

11658-400: The neural mechanisms underlying perception. Perceptual systems can also be studied computationally , in terms of the information they process. Perceptual issues in philosophy include the extent to which sensory qualities such as sound , smell or color exist in objective reality rather than in the mind of the perceiver. Although people traditionally viewed the senses as passive receptors,

11792-510: The nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi , he led targeted, nonviolent resistance against Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination. In 1957, King and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group was created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct nonviolent protests in the service of civil rights reform. The group

11926-407: The notion of structure through a discussion of work in psychology, linguistics and social anthropology . Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between primary and secondary modes of expression. This distinction appears in Phenomenology of Perception (p. 207, 2nd note [Fr. ed.]) and is sometimes repeated in terms of spoken and speaking language ( le langage parlé et le langage parlant ) ( The Prose of

12060-435: The notion that left-leaning policies, whether economic or social, stand in apparent contrast to Christian beliefs. The most common religious viewpoint that might be described as left-wing is social justice , or care for impoverished and oppressed minority groups . Supporters of this trend might encourage universal health care , welfare provisions, subsidized education, foreign aid , and affirmative action for improving

12194-422: The ontogenesis and phylogenesis of language; indeed he states that "language is the very voice of the trees, the waves and the forest". Merleau-Ponty himself refers to "that primordial being which is not yet the subject-being nor the object-being and which in every respect baffles reflection. From this primordial being to us, there is no derivation, nor any break..." Among the many working notes found on his desk at

12328-413: The other side of humanity (as flesh, nowise as 'matter')." This resonates with the conception of space, place, dwelling, and embodiment (in the flesh and physical, vs. virtual and cybernetic), especially as they are addressed against the background of the unfolding of the essence of modern technology. Such analytics figure in a Heideggerian take on "econtology" as an extension of Heidegger's consideration of

12462-403: The particular modalities of feminine bodily comportment as they differ from that of men. Young observes that while a man who throws a ball puts his whole body into the motion, a woman throwing a ball generally restricts her own movements as she makes them, and that, generally, in sports, women move in a more tentative, reactive way. Merleau-Ponty argues that people experience the world in terms of

12596-450: The perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activity", and he identifies this elemental matrix with the interdependent web of earthly life. This concept unites subject and object dialectically as determinations within a more primordial reality, which Merleau-Ponty calls "the flesh" and which Abram refers to variously as "the animate earth", "the breathing biosphere" or "the more-than-human natural world". Yet this

12730-435: The perceiver tacitly experiences all the perspectives upon that object coming from all the surrounding things of its environment, as well as the potential perspectives that that object has upon the beings around it. Each object is a "mirror of all others". The perception of the object through all perspectives is not that of a propositional, or clearly delineated, perception; rather, it is an ambiguous perception founded upon

12864-456: The perception of affective touch intensity, but not affective touch pleasantness. Therefore, the S1 is not directly involved in processing socially affective touch pleasantness, but still plays a role in discriminating touch location and intensity. Multi-modal perception refers to concurrent stimulation in more than one sensory modality and the effect such has on the perception of events and objects in

12998-422: The phenomenon itself. Merleau-Ponty chastised science for taking itself to be the area in which a complete account of nature may be given. The subjective depth of phenomena cannot be given in science as it is. This characterizes Merleau-Ponty's attempt to ground science in phenomenological objectivity and, in essence, to institute a "return to the phenomena". Merleau-Ponty's critical position with respect to science

13132-405: The primacy of the dimension of depth ( la profondeur ) as implied in the notion of being in the world ( être au monde ; to echo Heidegger 's In-der-Welt-sein ) and of one's own body ( le corps propre ). Reflections on spatiality in phenomenology are also central to the advanced philosophical deliberations in architectural theory . The highlighting of the fact that corporeity intrinsically has

13266-434: The principles of chaos theory . It was through this relationship with Merleau-Ponty's work that cognitive science's affair with phenomenology was born, which is represented by a growing number of works, including Merleau-Ponty has also been picked up by Australian and Nordic philosophers inspired by the French feminist tradition, including Rosalyn Diprose and Sara Heinämaa  [ fi ] . Heinämaa has argued for

13400-467: The products of one's cultural life. He carefully considers language , then, as the core of culture , by examining in particular the connections between the unfolding of thought and sense—enriching his perspective not only by an analysis of the acquisition of language and the expressivity of the body, but also by taking into account pathologies of language, painting, cinema, literature, poetry, and music. This work deals mainly with language, beginning with

13534-442: The publication in 1991 of The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela , Evan Thompson , and Eleanor Rosch , this association was extended, if only partially, to another strand of "anti-cognitivist" or post-representationalist cognitive science: embodied or enactive cognitive science, and later in the decade, to neurophenomenology . In addition, Merleau-Ponty's work has also influenced researchers trying to integrate neuroscience with

13668-577: The question of being ( Seinsfrage ) by way of the fourfold ( Das Geviert ) of earth-sky-mortals-divinities ( Erde und Himmel, Sterblichen und Göttlichen ). In this strand of "ecophenomenology", ecology is co-entangled with ontology, whereby the worldly existential analytics are grounded in earthiness, and environmentalism is orientated by ontological thinking. The following table gives a selection of Merleau-Ponty's works in French and English translation. Perception Perception (from Latin perceptio  'gathering, receiving')

13802-453: The range of which is typically considered to be between 20  Hz and 20,000 Hz. Frequencies higher than audio are referred to as ultrasonic , while frequencies below audio are referred to as infrasonic . The auditory system includes the outer ears , which collect and filter sound waves; the middle ear , which transforms the sound pressure ( impedance matching ); and the inner ear , which produces neural signals in response to

13936-642: The reflection on artistic expression in The Structure of Behavior —which contains a passage on El Greco (p. 203ff) that prefigures the remarks that he develops in "Cézanne's Doubt" (1945) and follows the discussion in Phenomenology of Perception . The work, undertaken while serving as the Chair of Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of the Sorbonne, is not a departure from his philosophical and phenomenological works, but rather an important continuation in

14070-444: The retina according to direction of origin. A dense surface of photosensitive cells, including rods, cones, and intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells captures information about the intensity, color, and position of incoming light. Some processing of texture and movement occurs within the neurons on the retina before the information is sent to the brain. In total, about 15 differing types of information are then forwarded to

14204-414: The same exploration behavior normally associated with novelty. Recent studies on lesions in the area concluded that rats with a damaged perirhinal cortex were still more interested in exploring when novel objects were present, but seemed unable to tell novel objects from familiar ones—they examined both equally. Thus, other brain regions are involved with noticing unfamiliarity, while the perirhinal cortex

14338-447: The sensation and flavor of food in the mouth. Other factors include smell , which is detected by the olfactory epithelium of the nose; texture , which is detected through a variety of mechanoreceptors , muscle nerves, etc.; and temperature, which is detected by thermoreceptors . All basic tastes are classified as either appetitive or aversive , depending upon whether the things they sense are harmful or beneficial. Smell

14472-418: The sense of familiarity in humans and other mammals. In tests, stimulating this area at 10–15 Hz caused animals to treat even novel images as familiar, and stimulation at 30–40 Hz caused novel images to be partially treated as familiar. In particular, stimulation at 30–40 Hz led to animals looking at a familiar image for longer periods, as they would for an unfamiliar one, though it did not lead to

14606-494: The shoe reconstructed by the brain of the person is the percept. Another example could be a ringing telephone. The ringing of the phone is the distal stimulus. The sound stimulating a person's auditory receptors is the proximal stimulus. The brain's interpretation of this as the "ringing of a telephone" is the percept. The different kinds of sensation (such as warmth, sound, and taste) are called sensory modalities or stimulus modalities . Psychologist Jerome Bruner developed

14740-462: The social gospel to achieve better social and economic equality. Christian anarchism , Christian communism , and Christian socialism are subsets of the socialist Christian left. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , authors of the Communist Manifesto , both had Christian upbringings; however, neither were devout Christians. As with any section within the left–right political spectrum ,

14874-415: The sound. By the ascending auditory pathway these are led to the primary auditory cortex within the temporal lobe of the human brain, from where the auditory information then goes to the cerebral cortex for further processing. Sound does not usually come from a single source: in real situations, sounds from multiple sources and directions are superimposed as they arrive at the ears. Hearing involves

15008-600: The source of knowledge , and maintained that the perceiving body and its perceived world could not be disentangled from each other. The articulation of the primacy of embodiment ( corporéité ) led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call "indirect ontology" or the ontology of "the flesh of the world" ( la chair du monde ), seen in his final and incomplete work, The Visible and Invisible , and his last published essay, "Eye and Mind". Merleau-Ponty engaged with Marxism throughout his career. His 1947 book, Humanism and Terror , has been widely understood as defense of

15142-427: The study of illusions and ambiguous images has demonstrated that the brain 's perceptual systems actively and pre-consciously attempt to make sense of their input. There is still active debate about the extent to which perception is an active process of hypothesis testing, analogous to science , or whether realistic sensory information is rich enough to make this process unnecessary. The perceptual systems of

15276-436: The subjective feeling of having chosen a particular action. Some conditions, such as schizophrenia , can cause a loss of this sense, which may lead a person into delusions, such as feeling like a machine or like an outside source is controlling them. An opposite extreme can also occur, where people experience everything in their environment as though they had decided that it would happen. Even in non- pathological cases, there

15410-548: The summer of 1939, as France declared war on Nazi Germany , he served on the frontlines in the French Army , where he was wounded in battle in June 1940. Upon returning to Paris in the fall of 1940, he married Suzanne Jolibois, a Lacanian psychoanalyst , and founded an underground resistance group with Jean-Paul Sartre called "Under the Boot". He participated in an armed demonstration against

15544-615: The time of his death, and published with the half-complete manuscript of The Visible and the Invisible , several make it evident that Merleau-Ponty himself recognized a deep affinity between his notion of a primordial "flesh" and a radically transformed understanding of "nature". Hence, in November 1960 he writes: "Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother." And in the last published working note, written in March 1961, he writes: "Nature as

15678-501: The traditional view of cognitive science. Dreyfus's seminal critique of cognitivism (or the computational account of the mind), What Computers Can't Do , consciously replays Merleau-Ponty's critique of intellectualist psychology to argue for the irreducibility of corporeal know-how to discrete, syntactic processes. Through the influence of Dreyfus's critique and neurophysiological alternative, Merleau-Ponty became associated with neurophysiological, connectionist accounts of cognition. With

15812-597: The upper surface of the tongue , called taste buds or gustatory calyculi . The human tongue has 100 to 150 taste receptor cells on each of its roughly-ten thousand taste buds. Traditionally, there have been four primary tastes: sweetness , bitterness , sourness , and saltiness . The recognition and awareness of umami , which is considered the fifth primary taste, is a relatively recent development in Western cuisine . Other tastes can be mimicked by combining these basic tastes, all of which contribute only partially to

15946-481: The viewer actually notices). The study of perception gave rise to the Gestalt School of Psychology , with an emphasis on a holistic approach. Christian left The Christian left is a range of Christian political and social movements that largely embrace social justice principles and uphold a social doctrine or social gospel based on their interpretation of the teachings of Christianity . Given

16080-466: The visual processing centers within the central nervous system. Light-altered neuron activation occurs within about 5–20 milliseconds in a rabbit retinal ganglion, although in a mouse retinal ganglion cell the initial spike takes between 40 and 240 milliseconds before the initial activation. The initial activation can be detected by an action potential spike, a sudden spike in neuron membrane electric voltage. A perceptual visual event measured in humans

16214-505: The world's things. The world and the sense of self are emergent phenomena in an ongoing "becoming". The essential partiality of the view of things, their being given only in a certain perspective and at a certain moment in time does not diminish their reality, but on the contrary establishes it, as there is no other way for things to be copresent in the world and with other things than through such " Abschattungen " (sketches, faint outlines, adumbrations). The thing transcends perception, but

16348-443: The world. Chronoception refers to how the passage of time is perceived and experienced. Although the sense of time is not associated with a specific sensory system , the work of psychologists and neuroscientists indicates that human brains do have a system governing the perception of time, composed of a highly distributed system involving the cerebral cortex , cerebellum , and basal ganglia . One particular component of

16482-517: Was a pseudonym of the 20-year-old Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty taught first at the Lycée de Beauvais (1931–33) and then got a fellowship to do research from the Caisse nationale de la recherche scientifique  [ fr ] . From 1934 to 1935 he taught at the Lycée de Chartres . He then in 1935 became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he tutored a young Michel Foucault and Trần Đức Thảo and

16616-475: Was also political editor for the leftist journal Les Temps modernes from its founding in October 1945 until December 1952. In his youth, he had read Karl Marx 's writings and Sartre even claimed that Merleau-Ponty converted him to Marxism . E. K. Kuby states that while Merleau-Ponty was not a member of the French Communist Party and did not identify as a Communist, he laid out an argument justifying

16750-490: Was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945). During this time, he attended Alexandre Kojeve 's influential seminars on Hegel and Aron Gurwitsch 's lectures on Gestalt psychology . In the spring of 1939, he was the first foreign visitor to the newly established Husserl Archives , where he consulted Husserl's unpublished manuscripts and met Eugen Fink and Herman Van Breda . In

16884-835: Was five years old. After secondary schooling at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris , Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Jean-Paul Sartre , Simone de Beauvoir , Simone Weil , Jean Hyppolite , and Jean Wahl . As Beauvoir recounts in her autobiography, she developed a close friendship with Merleau-Ponty and became smitten with him, but ultimately found him too well-adjusted to bourgeois life and values for her taste. He attended Edmund Husserl 's "Paris Lectures" in February 1929. In 1929, Merleau-Ponty received his DES degree ( diplôme d'études supérieures  [ fr ] , roughly equivalent to

17018-554: Was inspired by the crusades of evangelist Billy Graham , who befriended King, as well as the national organizing of the group in Friendship, founded by King allies Stanley Levison and Ella Baker . King led the SCLC until his death. As a Christian minister, King's main influence was Jesus Christ and the Christian gospels, which he would almost always quote in his religious meetings, speeches at church, and in public discourses. King's faith

17152-450: Was not the causal product of atomic sensations . This atomist-causal conception was being perpetuated in certain psychological currents of the time, particularly in behaviourism . According to Merleau-Ponty, perception has an active dimension, in that it is a primordial openness to the lifeworld (the " Lebenswelt "). This primordial openness is at the heart of his thesis of the primacy of perception. The slogan of Husserl's phenomenology

17286-743: Was particularly true among the Methodists and Anglo-Catholics in England, Father Adolph Kolping in Germany and Joseph Cardijn in Belgium. Some Christian groups were closely associated with the peace movements against the Vietnam War as well as the 2003 Invasion of Iraq . Religious leaders in many countries have also been on the forefront of criticizing any cuts to social welfare programs. In addition, many prominent civil rights activists were religious figures. In

17420-433: Was stated in his Preface to the Phenomenology : he described scientific points of view as "always both naive and at the same time dishonest". Despite, or perhaps because of, this view, his work influenced and anticipated the strands of modern psychology known as post-cognitivism . Hubert Dreyfus has been instrumental in emphasising the relevance of Merleau-Ponty's work to current post-cognitive research, and its criticism of

17554-694: Was strongly based in Jesus' commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself , loving God above all, and loving your enemies, praying for them and blessing them. His nonviolent thought was also based in the injunction to turn the other cheek in the Sermon on the Mount , and Jesus' teaching of putting the sword back into its place (Matthew 26:52). In his famous " Letter from Birmingham Jail ", King urged action consistent with what he describes as Jesus' "extremist" love, and also quoted numerous other Christian pacifist authors, which

17688-747: Was the extremely strong thread of egalitarianism in the New Testament . Other common leftist concerns such as pacifism , social justice , racial equality , human rights , and the rejection of excessive wealth are also expressed strongly in the Bible . In the late 19th century, the Social Gospel movement arose (particularly among some Anglicans , Lutherans , Methodists and Baptists in North America and Britain ,) which attempted to integrate progressive and socialist thought with Christianity to produce

17822-456: Was the presentation to individuals of an anomalous word. If these individuals are shown a sentence, presented as a sequence of single words on a computer screen, with a puzzling word out of place in the sequence, the perception of the puzzling word can register on an electroencephalogram (EEG). In an experiment, human readers wore an elastic cap with 64 embedded electrodes distributed over their scalp surface. Within 230 milliseconds of encountering

17956-513: Was very usual for him. In another sermon, he stated: Before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the Gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment. You know, actually all that I do in civil rights I do because I consider it a part of my ministry. I have no other ambitions in life but to achieve excellence in the Christian ministry. I don't plan to run for any political office. I don't plan to do anything but remain

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