I caught most of the episode of In our Time on the subject of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
the other morning and found it intriguing. I had encountered phenomenology in my
teaching career and used parts of Habermas with senior students but not read any
Merleau-Ponty. Later, attending a concert by the pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason of
Rachminov's 3rd Piano Concerto I was stunned by her performance, entirely from
memory, her whole body in unified action drawing on embodied mind-body recall and
live interaction with the orchestra.
The full In our Time episode is essential listening out a number of ideas that
we could pick up. The Book will be a difficult read I guess but is available as a
PDF
and there are a lot of videos on the subject.
There are links back to George Lakoff (Metaphors) who you will remember saw
language as emergent from our experience of the world and in turn shaping our
thoughts.
The philosophy of Merleau-Ponty might seem somewhat irrelevant in the face of the real challenges we each face in our personal, civic and global life, so I would like to do this session in two parts: the first looking at Merleau-Ponty and its relevance, and the second talking about the philosophies we each practically use in daily life. I mean 'philosophy' in the broad sense as a way of understanding people, society and the world and informing our actions. To that end I've added some links to the web page to the work of Jonny Thompson's Mini Philosophy series. So first part research, second part personal reflection.