ABSTRACT
In this chapter I explore a series of fertile ambiguities that Merleau-Ponty’s work is premised on. These ambiguities concern some of the central methodological commitments of his work, in particular his commitment (or otherwise) to transcendental phenomenology, his relationship to science and philosophical naturalism, and what they suggest about his methodology. Many engagements with Merleau-Ponty’s work that are more ‘analytic’ in orientation either deflate it of its transcendental heritage or offer a ‘modest’ rendering of its transcendental dimensions. This is also broadly true of the work of the more empirically minded phenomenological philosophers who engage seriously with Merleau-Ponty—for example, Hubert Dreyfus, Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, and others. At the same time, many other scholars contest these proto-scientific and more naturalistic uses of Merleau-Ponty’s work on hermeneutical and exegetical grounds, and they likewise criticize the deflated reading of his transcendental phenomenology that tends to support them. By working through some of the key passages and ideas, this chapter sides with the more naturalist view and extends these interpretations by arguing that, at least around the time of Phenomenology of Perception, his philosophy might be reasonably regarded as a form of minimal methodological naturalism.
