Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity

This book draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, psychology, neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy to explicate Merleau-Ponty's 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-Ponty's 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-Ponty's 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-Ponty's texts and the overall approach is both scholarly and innovative. 

                                             

Anya Daly completed a double-badged doctorate from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and l'Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, in December 2012. Her thesis, 'The problem of the Other in the work of Merleau-Ponty: From Epistemology to Ethics' explicated Merleau-Ponty's implicit ethics from his accounts of embodiment, primordial percipience and his non-dual ontology.


Anya Daly spent five years in France researching and teaching across various disciplines in undergraduate, masters and doctoral programs, returning to Australia in 2010. Since then she has been based in Melbourne where she has taught on a number of the undergraduate programs in the Philosophy Department at the University of Melbourne.  Her research continues to be focused on the nexus phenomenology, neuroscience and psychology, specifically with regard to perception, destructiveness and ethical failure. Her additional research interests include creativity, aesthetics, the philosophy of psychiatry and Buddhist philosophy.