Perception, Language, and Action: an Introduction to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty

The thoughts of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty are intertwined throughout their philosophical developments. Both take their departure in phenomenology’s central insight that the mind transcends itself toward the world and the attending dissolution of the false problem of how the mind can hook up onto the world. As Sartre once put it: “Each of us was trying to understand the world insofar as he could, and with the means at his disposal. And we had the same means – then called Husserl and Heidegger – as we were similarly disposed.” (“Merleau-Ponty vivant”) At the same time, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were both dissatisfied with the accounts that Husserl and Heidegger provided of the relations between perception, language and action. German phenomenology, they argue, stumbles over the problems of other minds and history. However, their respective diagnoses are fundamentally divergent, and so are the alternative accounts that they seek to articulate. The aim of the course is to introduce students to the thoughts of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty by attending to the life-long philosophical debate between them. It is driven by the hypothesis that each of the two authors is at once the most penetrating reader and the deepest critic of the other. Although the course will recurrently present their philosophies against the background of concepts and problems bequeathed by the analytic tradition and in the light of recent debates in analytic philosophy (we will revisit the Dreyfus-McDowell debate regarding the place of conceptual capacities in perception, the McDowell-Pippin debate about agency, and contemporary debates about self-knowledge revolving around the so-called “Transparency principle”), it departs from the current analytic reception of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in that it does not confine itself to their early works but delves into their mature works as well.