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World, Body and Perception in Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty
Tůma, Martin ; De Santis, Daniele (advisor) ; Švec, Ondřej (referee)
The purpose of this thesis is (1) to present a general picture of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, (2) to identify and describe the most fundamental features of his phenomenology, and (3) to explain his view of the relationship between humans and the world. To do this, I use mainly Merleau- Ponty's most well-known book Phenomenology of Perception (1945), and to a lesser degree his unfinished manuscript The Visible and the Invisible (1964). My interpretative approach is heavily influenced by Hubert Dreyfus' reading of Merleau-Ponty, as he presents it in his series of lectures dedicated this thinker. The central feature of this line of interpretation is that it situates Merleau-Ponty into a Heideggerian framework. In the picture which this thesis presents, Merleau-Ponty considers subject and object not to be basic ontological categories, but derivative of a more fundamental reality, a deeper domain of experience where the inner and the outer intermingle and intertwine so it is impossible to say to what degree is one active and the other passive, or even where one ends and the other begins. In the reading I present here, at the bottom of this experiential milieu there is an unceasing striving towards an organization which is most conductive towards optimal coping with the environment, or towards maximum...
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