Nature and Logos: A Whiteheadian Key to Merleau-Ponty's Fundamental Thought

William S. Hamrick · Jan Van der Veken

Jan 2012 · State University of New York Press

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This is the first booklength account of how Maurice Merleau-Ponty used certain texts by Alfred North Whitehead to develop an ontology based on nature, and how he could have used other Whitehead texts that he did not know in order to complete his last ontology. This account is enriched by several of Merleau-Ponty's unpublished writings not previously available in English, by the first detailed treatment of certain works by F.W.J. Schelling in the course of showing how they exerted a substantial influence on both Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead, and by the first extensive discussion of Merleau-Ponty's interest in the Stoics's notion of the twofold logos—the logos endiathetos and the logos proforikos. This book provides a thorough exploration of the consonance between these two philosophers in their mutual desire to overcome various bifurcations of nature, and of nature from spirit, that continued to haunt philosophy and science since the 17th-century.

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William S. Hamrick is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville and has written and edited several books, including (with coeditor Suzanne L. Cataldi) Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought, also published by SUNY Press. Jan Van der Veken is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven and has written and edited several books, including (with coeditor Patrick Burke) Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspectives.