Merleau-Ponty and the Essence of Nature

Taylor Knight is an Independent Scholar who holds a DPhil in Theology from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Philosophy from the Institut Catholique de Paris. He has published on twentieth-century French philosophy and on the Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa. He has journal articles in Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie et Religionsphilosophie and Sophia.

• Foreword by Emmanuel FalqueIntroduction: The Return to the ElementThe Powers of Becoming: Early Greek Thought and Contemporary Biology in Merleau-Ponty’s Elemental OntologyThe Correlation of Sensation: From Act to PowerThe Elemental Bond: Surpassing Phenomenological AtomismCosmogonic Elementals in Phenomenology: From Husserl and Heidegger to Levinas and Merleau-PontyThe Savagery of the Symbol: The Barbarian Principle and Elemental NegationSymbolics of the Flesh: From Tautegory to ChiasmWhat the Sea Left Behind: The Element as the UnconsciousConclusion

Knight works against the grain both of readings of Merleau-Ponty as a forerunner of Derrida or Foucault, and of the idea that many of his claims are strongly implicit already in the work of Husserl. Merleau-Ponty is instead situated in a line from Plato through some speculative idealism, as a philosopher turning endlessly around the knot of phenomenality and what it occludes.