Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity

This book draws on Merleau-Pontys phenomenology, psychology, neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy to explicate Merleau-Pontys unwritten ethics. Daly contends that though Merleau-Ponty never developed an ethics per se, there is significant textual evidence that clearly indicates he had the intention to do so. This book highlights the explicit references to ethics that he offers and proposes that these, allied to his ontological commitments, provide the basis for the development of an ethics. In this work Daly shows how Merleau-Pontys relational ontology, in which the interdependence of self, other and world is affirmed, offers an entirely new approach to ethics. In contrast to the top-down ethics of norms, obligations and prescriptions, Daly maintains that Merleau-Pontys ethics is a bottom-up ethics which depends on direct insight into our own intersubjective natures, the I within the we and the we within the I; insight into the real nature of our relation to others and the particularities of the given situation. Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity is an important contribution to the scholarship on the later Merleau-Ponty which will be of interest to graduate students and scholars. Daly offers informed readings of Merleau-Pontys texts and the overall approach is both scholarly and innovative.