Chiasmi International n. 8

Of all Husserl’s successors, Merleau-Ponty is certainly the one who was the most concerned about remaining in contact with the sciences as they are practiced and of not separating philosophical reflection from a meditation on their ontological signification. Within this dialogue, psychology plays a privileged role, as in The Structure of Behavior, since it is starting from the results of a Gestalt inspired psychology that Merleau-Ponty reforms the idea of the cogito. As psychology takes the subject of reflection itself as its object, it confronts the problem of the relationship between the transcendental subject and the empirical subject, making it possible to establish the unity of the soul and of the body required by the phenomenology of perception. This settling of accounts between Merleau-Ponty and the sciences would not have been complete without a confrontation between phenomenological psychology and the enactive emergentism of Fracisco Varela. TEXTS BY: Cecilia Antolini, Renaud Barbaras, Matteo Bonazzi, Susan Bredlau, Alexandre Cleret, Patrick Flack, Kirsten Jacobson, Kym Maclaren, Mersia Menin, David Morris, Leandro Neves Cardim, Mario Teodoro Ramirez, Claudio Rozzoni, John Russon, Marcus Sacrini A. Ferraz, Davide Scarso, Maria Talero, Jessica Wiskus.