Philosophy Postgraduate Colloquium – 31/05/11

Title: Sketch for a Merleau-Pontian Ethics

Speaker: Anya Daly

Date, Time: 31/05/11, 5:15pm

Location: Old Quad Common Room

Abstract: Merleau-Ponty has provocatively claimed that resolving ‘the problem of the Other’ (the problem of other minds) would lead to an entire reconstruction of western philosophy. Why would this philosopher – renowned for his humility make such a seemingly grandiose claim? He further claims that all the perplexities, most notably solipsism and scepticism, that have occupied philosophers since Plato, have been founded on an error, an error that reached its apogee with Descartes’ dualism.

This error is the denigration and rejection of both perception and the body in epistemic endeavours. The ambitions of philosophers, such as Plato, to found understanding of the world on pure reason has cleaved the world into appearance/ reality, subjective/ objective, interior/ exterior, immanance/ transcendence and self/ other. The phenomenological projects of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty seek to rectify this error by reinstating perception and the body at the heart of the epistemic enterprise.

Just as the problem of the Other, understood as an epistemic problem, requires a compete reconstruction of philosophy, so too, I propose, a parallel claim can be made in regard to ethics. On the basis of MP’s non-dual ontology, the problem of the ethical other needs to be radically rethought.

To defend this claim, I rely on phenomenological analysis, which finds empirical support in recent neuroscience. The work of philosopher/ neuroscientist Shaun Gallagher is significant to my claims. Gallagher has proposed, following Trevarthen, that in ‘Theory of mind” the predominant accounts of Theory theory and Simulation theory belong to a secondary level of Theory of Mind, and he proposes (without rejecting TT & ST) that there is in fact a more primary level which he terms Interactive Theory of Mind. My claim is that the current accounts in Ethics constitute a secondary level, which depends on a more primary level that gives meaning to and motivates their accounts. This primary level, I claim, is implicit in MP’s non-dual ontology. My thesis aims to make this explicit.