Moore Institute/ Discipline of Philosophy – Research Seminar ‘Idea, Multiplicity, Reflection, Merleau – Ponty’s Radical Concepts’ by Prof Dorothea Olkowski (University of Colorado)

The Moore Institute and the Discipline of Philosophy are pleased invite you to the following research seminar:

“Idea, Multiplicity, Reflection,

Merleau-Ponty’s Radical Concepts”

by

Prof. Dorothea Olkowski

University of Colorado

Abstract: Merleau-Ponty has argued that for experience – as opposed to sensation which is private, or intellect which is a shared idea – there is an expectation if not a demand, that we are somehow seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, or smelling something as opposed to sensing or thinking it. Nevertheless, in comparing our perceptions with those of others, there is often nothing but contradiction, so that the point of thinking seems to be to erase those contradictions: But what if even thought is full of contradictions? For Merleau-Ponty, we have no better evidence for this than the four antinomies that Kant places before us both as a warning and in order to untangle their contradictions. For, in spite of the contradictions inherent in the absolute or pure use of the intuitions of space and time and the concepts of substance, mechanical causality, and necessary being, these particular contradictions are still “the very condition of consciousness, ” so that without reflection, not merely perception but life itself “would probably dissipate itself in ignorance of itself or in chaos.” This claim serves as a warning regarding our assumptions about phenomenology, for when we announce our faith in “the primacy of perception” we may not know what we are actually claiming. This paper asks what it means to say that scientific knowledge and physico-mathematical relations make sense only insofar as we understand that intellectual knowledge and abstract ideas have the same structures and horizons as our perceptual experience?

Dorothea Olkowski is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and Director of the Cognitive Studies Minor. She specializes in feminist theory, phenomenology and contemporary French philosophy. Her publications include Time in Feminist Phenomenology (with Christina SchÌ_es and Helen Fielding, Indiana UP, 2012), Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn(Indiana UP 2011), Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty (with Gail Weiss, Penn State University Press, 2006), The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible) (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), Resistance, Flight, Creation, Feminist Enactments of French Philosophy (Cornell, 2000) and Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (University of California Press, 1999).

For questions, please contact felix.omurchadha@nuigalway.ie