Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) and Aron Gurwitsch (1901-1973) had a very close relationship. However, the comparative studies of them have not been sufficiently conducted. There are several possible reasons for this situation, but the most important is that while Merleau-Ponty learned a lot from Gurwitsch about Gestalt psychology and Husserl’s phenomenology, he rarely referred to him in his texts, making it difficult to track their relationships on texts. However, there is a hopeful clue for comparative studies of them. Merleau-Ponty wrote a reading note on Gurwitsch’s The Field of Consciousness. In this article, I try to reconstruct the controversy that could be arisen between them by reading The Field of Consciousness and Merleau-Ponty’s “Reading Notes.” The purpose of this paper is 1) to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Gurwitsch, concerning his understanding of the identity and realism of objects given in perceptual experiences 2) to make Merleau-Ponty’s position about the themes clear in comparison with Gurwitsch’s position In the first section, as a preliminary work, I examine Gurwitsch’s “Theory of Reference” which is mainly developed in The Field of Consciousness. In the second section, through a close reading of “Reading Notes,” I try to show the essence of Merleau-Ponty’s criticism directed at the Gurwitsch’s “Theory of Reference.” In the third section, I discuss how Merleau-Ponty’s view is characterized in comparison with Gurwitsch.

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This paper focuses on the texts on hearing in “Cours sur la perception” included in Jules Lagneau’s Célèbres leçons et fragments, and discusses active judgement of the spirit related to the function of hearing, confirming the characteristics of various elements constructing music. The texts on hearing are distinctive in that they include descriptions on art, or more specifically, music, while the texts on vision and touch describes extension in general. While Merleau-Ponty criticized Lagneau in Phénoménologie de la perception, focusing on Lagneau’s texts on vision, this paper dares to focus on those on hearing. The latter texts are undoubtedly one of the clearest manifestations of active (and therefore highly evaluated) function of the spirit that Lagneau emphasized throughout the argument on perception. But they might be considered as a device of Lagneau to introduce “émotion” as the third term into the cartesian dualism. Using Lagneau’s concepts of “modification” and “attente”(expectation / waiting), this paper points out that perception in his understanding is not unmediated, but something more complicated, mediated and reconstructed, which is supported, not without endeavors, by active judgment of the spirit.

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This report describes the experience of “the body of the self” of qigong practices, and how qigong practices of “it melts the mind” is released, and a body wants to clarify whether a person transforms it. In addition, I want to thereby introduce new ideas to promote a body and mind more affective transformation by “qigong”. “It does not show” “the mind”. “I see objectivity” because I do not see it, and there is not it, however can feel it, as “it is subjective”. I am returned to “the experience that was able to live” that I had just before the thing that we are objective and may let existence of “the mind”, so to speak, rise for transcendentalism by describing the physical experience of practicing “qigong”. “The mind” in “qigong” increases power and does not have the clear sense that I push it and draw out, but I work in the physical “slack” and bring a change. Learning of “the qigong” is always new, and a purpose and directionality may not be the same all the time. It is the toric learning that knowledge and the experience that are not natural are always renovated that thought that I am ordinary.

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This paper examines the influence of Simone de Beauvoir on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work on ethics. Scholars have often pointed out that Beauvoir incorporated the Merleau-Pontian notion of embodiment into her ethics. It is much less known how Merleau-Pont was affected by her ethics. In order to clarify the significance of Beauvoir for Merleau-Ponty’s ethics, we analyze how he interpreted She Came to Stay (1943) and Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944) in “Metaphysics and the Novel” (1945) and “Hegel’s Existentialism” (1945). This paper is an attempt to make it clear that Merleau-Ponty valued Beauvoir’s idea of temporality as a strong objection to the “absolute immoralism,” which he sees in Albert Camus. Merleau-Ponty finds the basis for responsible action in Beauvoir’s description of subjectivity as traversing time by projecting herself. Our analysis will also attempt to demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty cited Pyrrhus and Cineas to think of authenticity in a different way than Being and Time (1927). Beauvoir’s arguments on temporality and freedom serve for Merleau-Ponty as counterarguments against the Heideggerian concept of authenticity as anticipation of death. Finally, we shall attempt to demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir were opposed to Camus regarding the issue of the moral evaluation of commitment to history.

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Le problème de la sexualité que Beauvoir a posé dans le Deuxième Sexe (1949) était aussi essentiel pour Merleau-Ponty dès la Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945). En outre, dans ses Cours de Sorbonne (1949-1952), présentant Le Deuxième sexe, il semble approfondir ses réflexions à propos de la sexualité et du corps sexuel de femme, qui sont encore lacunaires dans la Phénoménologie. Dans cette recherche, nous examinons comment les théories beauvoirienne et merleau-pontienne de la sexualité se recroisent. Nous mettons en évidence une différence entre leurs conceptions de la psychanalyse et du matérialisme historique. Après avoir examiné ces deux domaines « au sens large », Merleau-Ponty se réfère à l’étude culturaliste de Margaret Mead pour donner suite à la discussion beauvoirienne, et nie ainsi l’idée d’une « nature » permanente de femme (et de l’homme) qui n’aurait aucun rapport avec son environnement social et sa culture.

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Cet article a pour but d’ éclaircir la notion de corps et sexualité de Merleau-Ponty dans La phénoménologie de la perception par comparaison avec celle de Beauvoir dans Le deuxième sexe qui a paru en 1949. On ne trouve pas de descriptions du corps et de la signification humaine dans Pyrrhus et Cinéas de Beauvoir qui a paru en 1944. En 1945, La phénoménologie de la perception de Merleau-Ponty a été publié et le compte rendu que Beauvoir a fait sur ce livre s’est inséré dans Les Temps Modernes 1, no2. Son compte rendu comporte des mentions de «le corps comme prise sur le monde» et «la signification humaine» . «Le corps comme prise sur le monde» joue un rôle essentiel dans La phénoménologie de la perception parce qu’il constitue le monde. D’autre part, «le corps revêtu de signification» joue un rôle essentiel dans Le deuxième sexe de Beauvoir parce qu’il fonde l’oppression des femmes. Mais, Merleau-Ponty mentionne non seulement «le corps qui donne un sens à des objets», mais encore «le corps revêtu de signification» dans son livre. En ce qui concerne «le corps revêtu de signification», on peut dire que Beauvoir est influencée par Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty ainsi que Beauvoir considèrent la sexualité comme une médiation entre des hommes. Cependant, ce qui est original chez Merleau-Ponty, c’est qu’il la considère comme une intentionnalité et les racines vitales de la perception , de la motricité et de la représentation. Et il dit que la sexualité exprime l’existance en la réalisant. Chez Beauvoir, le mot de sexualité a plusieurs sens, par exmple, l’acte sexuel, le désir sexuel et l’identité sexuelle. Et elle dit qu’ il y aura une relation constante de la sexualité aux formes sociales.

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In this paper I aim to re-think the question of the world of persons with schizophrenia from the perspective of the German phenomenologist Max Scheler and that of the Japanese psychiatrist Bin Kimura. So far, no comparison between these two authors has been made, even though there are several convergences and evidence of Scheler’s indirect influence on Bin Kimura through Viktor von Weizsäcker. In recent years Dan Zahavi, Louis Sass and Josef Parnas have interpreted the modus vivendi of persons with schizophrenia in relation to a disturbance on the level of “minimal self”. Subsequently, the discussion has highlighted the importance of disorders at the level of intercorporeality and intersubjectivity (Thomas Fuchs) and at the level of “existential feelings” (Matthew Ratcliffe). This paper argues that Max Scheler and Bin Kimura allow us to focus on an aspect that has so far been neglected: that of a “relational self ” that relates to the very foundation of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality and that can thus be reborn in the encounter with the other and position itself in the world in a different way. In Scheler’s perspective, the world of persons with schizophrenia is the result of an enactive and axiological disorder (valueception) that impairs contact with the primordial life impulse(Lebensdrang). As a consequence, they are incapable of attuning emotionally and socially with others: this prevents the singularity from being reborn in the encounter with the other and forces her to position herself in her own solipsistic universe. Moving in a similar direction, Bin Kimura interprets the world of persons with schizophrenia as the result of a disorder of aida (one of the central concepts of Japanese culture that indicates the space of being in between). The disorder of aida compromises the basic relationship(Grundverhältnis in the sense of Viktor von Weizsäcker) and hinders what Bin Kimura calls festum, i.e. the birth of subjectivity, so that it is experienced by persons with schizophrenia only as ante festum. Starting from these two perspectives, I argue the existence of an axiological and anthropogenetic dimension of psychopathology. I begin with a discussion of Zahavi’s concept of minimal self and the thesis that finds out on this level the disorders at the origin of the world of persons with schizophrenia. I then analyze Max Scheler’s position and its historic importance for the emergence of phenomenological psychopathology. Thereafter, I introduce the concepts of “disorder of aida” (Bin Kimura) and “disorder of ordo amoris” (Max Scheler). Finally, I develop the concept of a “psychopathology of ordo amoris” by also comparing it with Ratcliffe’s thesis of “existential feelings”.

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