Why “Ontology and Sense”?
When I thought about a name for this blog, I wanted to refer to core themes in Merleau-Ponty’s work, but it was a difficult choice. I recently have become very interested in the overlap between his interest in ontology and his focus on sensation. Ted Toadvine has written about Merleau-Ponty’s “ontology of sense” and this is also a recent interest of mine, and something I have written about but not published yet.
I think the words “ontology” and “sense” capture two of Merleau-Ponty’s major interests. He sought to connect them: to connect form with perception, to connect the in-itself and the for-me, and to connect logical “sense” with “non-sense” in his dialectical ontology.
References:
Toadvine, T. “Singing the World in a New Key: Merleau-Ponty and the Ontology of Sense”.