Mead and Merleau-Ponty: Toward A Common Vision - Hardcover

Rosenthal, Sandra B.; Bourgeois, Patrick L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0791407896 ISBN 13: 9780791407899

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 1991

Synopsis

Unites George Herbert Mead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in a shared rejection of substance philosophy as well as spectator theory of knowledge, in favor of a focus on the ultimacy of temporal process and the constitutive function of social praxis.

This book unites George Herbert Mead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in a shared rejection of substance philosophy as well as spectator theory of knowledge, in favor of a focus on the ultimacy of temporal process and the constitutive function of social praxis. Both Mead and Merleau-Ponty return to the richness of lived experience within nature, and both lead to radically new, insightful visions of the nature of selfhood, language, freedom, and time itself, as well as of the nature of the relation between the so-called “tensions” of appearance and reality, sensation and object, the individual and the community, freedom and constraint, and continuity and creativity.

About this title

About the Author

Sandra B. Rosenthal is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Loyola University, New Orleans.

Patrick L. Bourgeois is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Loyola University, New Orleans.

Review

“The authors delineate the distinctive strengths of Mead the pragmatist and Merleau-Ponty the existential phenomenologist and then trace the ways in which they mutually reinforce each other. Through this technique in chapter after chapter they analyze important points in the philosophy of the two thinkers in new and fruitful fashion.” ― Lewis E. Hahn, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

“This is certainly a provocative interpretation of both philosophers. Part of its interest is the systematic way it locates Mead’s pragmatism and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in the context of the dominant traditions of Western philosophy, showing the similarity of their reactions to the fundamental assumptions of both rationalist and empiricist philosophies.

“I found myself disagreeing with the authors at several points. But the intensity with which I had to concentrate on those very sections is evidence that this is a book to be taken seriously.” ― Beth J. Singer, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0791407896
• ISBN 13: 9780791407899
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 231