Merleau-Ponty’s Transcendental Project

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that Merleau-Ponty reformulates traditional transcendental philosophy in the sense of showing that the a priori conditions of experience cannot be separated from the concrete experiences. In the first section, I revisit Kant and Husserl, to show how these authors delimit the transcendental conditions as a formal domain independent from any concrete experience. Then I reconstruct the argumentative move through which Merleau-Ponty rejects this formal delimitation of the transcendental sphere and reintroduces it as inseparable from empirical domain, initially in The Structure of Behavior (section 2) and later in Phenomenology of Perception (section 3).

Keywords: phenomenology, transcendental philosophy, Merleau-Ponty, body, real world