Merleau-Ponty and the Essence of Nature

Taylor Knight is an Independent Scholar who holds a DPhil in Theology from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Philosophy from the Institut Catholique de Paris. He has published on twentieth-century French philosophy and on the Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa. He has journal articles in Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie et Religionsphilosophie and Sophia.

Knight works against the grain both of readings of Merleau-Ponty as a forerunner of Derrida or Foucault, and of the idea that many of his claims are strongly implicit already in the work of Husserl. Merleau-Ponty is instead situated in a line from Plato through some speculative idealism, as a philosopher turning endlessly around the knot of phenomenality and what it occludes.

• Foreword by Emmanuel FalqueIntroduction: The Return to the ElementThe Powers of Becoming: Early Greek Thought and Contemporary Biology in Merleau-Ponty’s Elemental OntologyThe Correlation of Sensation: From Act to PowerThe Elemental Bond: Surpassing Phenomenological AtomismCosmogonic Elementals in Phenomenology: From Husserl and Heidegger to Levinas and Merleau-PontyThe Savagery of the Symbol: The Barbarian Principle and Elemental NegationSymbolics of the Flesh: From Tautegory to ChiasmWhat the Sea Left Behind: The Element as the UnconsciousConclusion