philosophical conversations

Merleau-Ponty: lived body

Trevor,
you may may be puzzled about my references to lived body as a way out of the flybottle of your understanding of Australian materialism. The idea of lived body comes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. It can be used to overcome the uselessness of Australian materialism, which is little more than the old Greek atoms in the void souped up with modern mathematical physics.

What Merleau-Ponty opens up is the idea that it is primarily through our lived body (as felt and experienced by the human subject) that we have access to, and an anchorage in, the world of particular places.