Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Craig, Megan | Casey, Edward S. | Rawlinson, Mary | Trigg, Dylan.
Date
2014-12-01
Keywords
Philosophy | embodiment, Merleau-Ponty, metaphor, place, thought
Department
Department of Philosophy.
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/76618
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
All experience is embodied and, concomitantly, all experience is emplaced. It follows that abstract thought, as a mode of experience, is always emplaced. In what sense is this the case? Following the insights of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this dissertation seeks to answer this question. A first key insight comes from Phenomenology of Perception: namely, the suggestion that every thought is a bodily experience, and that abstract thought expresses bodily capacities that, through imagination, enter into realms of the virtual. A second key insight comes from Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy, especially The Visible and the Invisible: this is his account of language as a situating power and mode of participating in the world, an account that goes against a common philosophical habit of treating linguistic meaning as operating at a level that is removed from the sensible. With these insights in mind, we can develop a concept of place as that which solicits the bodily capacities through a dynamic process that is incessantly being transfigured; for humans, this transfiguration manifests especially through the situating power of language. This notion of emplacement is further enriched by a concept of metaphor that, building off the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, regards metaphor as the mechanism by which situated, bodily understanding leaps from one placial domain to another in the constitution of new understanding. We can thus understand thought as a mode of inhabitation of place. | 311 pages
Recommended Citation
Irwin, Brian A., "The Placiality of Thought" (2014). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 2508.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/2508