Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature

Introduction: Renewing the Philosophy of Nature

ix Acknowledgments There is nothing like the effort to acknowledge in writing one’s intellectual debts to show the true insufficiency and impossibility of that task. The list of colleagues and friends who have left their imprint on my thinking and these pages seems endless, but among them are David Abram, Alia Al-Saji, Bryan Bannon, Renaud Barbaras, Rudolf Bernet, Étienne Bimbenet, Pat Burke, Tom Busch, Mauro Carbone, Ed Casey, Françoise Dastur, Chris Diehm, the late Mike Dillon, Lester Embree, Fred Evans, Helen Fielding, Bruce Foltz, Larry Hass, Jim Hatley, Sara Heinämaa, Galen Johnson, Irene Klaver, Chris Latiolais, John Llewelyn, the late Don Marietta Jr., Jerry Miller, Hugh Silverman, Bob Vallier, Steve Vogel, Gail Weiss, and David Wood. To the many of you whom I have neglected to mention, my debt is consequently all the greater. Deserving of special thanks is Charles S. Brown, my erstwhile colleague at Emporia State University, whose collaboration helped my ideas about ecophenomenology first find their feet. At the University of Oregon , I am grateful to Scott Pratt and John Lysaker, chairs of the Philosophy Department, and Dan Udovic and Alan Dickman, directors of the Environmental Studies Program, for the dependable support and encouragement that has made holding a joint position in these programs a rare pleasure. Carla Bengtson, Brook Muller, and Louise “Molly” Westling , interdisciplinary colleagues at Oregon, have constantly stretched my thinking in unexpected directions. Special thanks as well to Beata Stawarska, colleague in Philosophy and fellow Merleau-Ponty scholar, who collaborated with me to host the Merleau-Ponty Circle at Oregon in 2005. The members of the Merleau-Ponty Circle and the International Association for Environmental Philosophy, before whom many of these ideas were presented and discussed for the first time, have been enormously supportive over the years and have provided me with a genuine sense of philosophical community. Intellectually, I owe the most to the students who have been my abiding interlocutors in developing these ideas, especially Taylor Hammer and Matt Lexow at Emporia State University, and the graduate students at Oregon who have taken my courses on Merleau-Ponty: Sarah x A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Adams, Amrita Bannerjee, Kara Barnette, Elena Cuffari, Al Frankowski, Aurora Hudson, Emma Jones, Jason Jordan, Paul Qualtere-Burcher, Christy Reynolds, Melissa Sexton, Jessica Sims, and Edgar Temam. My thinking has especially benefited from conversations with Lori Brown, Elizabeth Caldwell, Miles Hentrup, Thomas Nail, Jason Schreiner, Lucy Schultz, and Sean Williams. I thank Corinne Painter and Christian Lotz for the invitation that led to the writing of chapter 3, a slightly revised version of “How Not to Be a Jellyfish: Human Exceptionalism and the Ontology of Reflection,” which was originally published in Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal : At the Limits of Experience, edited by Corinne Painter and Christian Lotz, copyright © 2007 by Springer. The essay is reprinted with kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media. Thanks also to Marc Rölli for the invitation to present an earlier version of chapter 4, “The Space of Intentionality and the Orientation of Being,” at the German Society for Phenomenology conference on “Spaces and Places: Tensions of a Paradigm” in Darmstadt in 2007. The anonymous reviewers for the Northwestern University Press provided invaluable suggestions for revising the manuscript as a whole, and the staff of the Press has been enormously helpful in preparing it for publication. I am especially grateful to Tony Steinbock, director of the SPEP Series at Northwestern, for his confidence in my work and encouragement throughout this process. The two debts that I am least able to articulate succinctly have been saved for last. The first of these is to Leonard Lawlor, director of my dissertation on Merleau-Ponty at the University of Memphis. This work would certainly not have been possible without Len’s constant friendship , professional guidance, and inspiration. His philosophical provocations have repeatedly forced me to deepen my thinking and raise my game. Finally, I am infinitely grateful to Janet Fiskio, my constant intellectual companion through these investigations. Her incisive comments on draft after draft have saved you, the reader, from many a clumsy sentence and muddled thought. xi Abbreviations Texts by Merleau-Ponty C Causeries 1948 (Paris: Seuil, 2002); The World of Perception, translated by Oliver Davis (London: Routledge, 2004). IPP In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays (includes Themes from the Lectures at the...