Gratton and Sparrow on Merleau-Ponty

Concerning my interchange yesterday with Minds and Brains (who incidentally sent a friendly letter afterward and seems like a nice guy), you can read these two different follow-up posts by

GRATTON and SPARROW

A brief word about Merleau-Ponty. I know he’s made some contributions in various areas. He’s also a remarkable stylist, and for me that doesn’t just mean ornament pasted onto rigorous argument. (His style is strange, though, because he bursts out into beautifully weird metaphors in the midst of a relatively grim academic prose rhythm. In other words, he’s a great stylist on the level of individual sentences, but not on the level of chapters or whole essays.)

But the point is, his ontology is not as original as he is often credited with. When I was in graduate school, everyone seemed to have this sense that The Visible and the Invisible was a secret doorway onto some completely new future of philosophy, and I’m afraid that’s really not the case, nice though it would be.

I’ve written about this before, but if there were a vote for which major Western philosopher is the most surprisingly unexpected based on what had come before, my vote would probably go to Bergson.