Marie-Eve Morin, Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Sense and Being: At the Limits of Phenomenology – Edinburgh University Press, July 2022 (hardback and e-book); July 2023 (paperback)

Brings a new dimension to thinking about philosophical materialism and realism in the wake of phenomenology and deconstruction

• Challenges speculative realism’s critique of contemporary Continental philosophy as correlationism
• Uses Merleau-Ponty and Nancy to develop an ontology that respects the materiality and exteriority of what exists without reinstating the mind–world divide
• Shows how Merleau-Ponty and Nancy overcome the Cartesian presupposition at work in current realist appeal to step out of our own thoughts to reach the ‘great outdoors’
• Provides an alternative to the phenomenological reduction of being to sense
• Defends anthropomorphism as a way of overcoming the Cartesian–Sartrian ontology of the object

Marie-Eve Morin proposes a reinterpretation of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy from the perspective of realist and object-oriented tendencies in contemporary philosophy. The realist critique of subject-centred anthropocentric thinking indicates the danger, inherent in the phenomenological approach, of reducing being to sense. Morin demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty and Nancy avoid this pitfall through the development of ontologies that respect the materiality and exteriority of what exists without reaffirming the Cartesian divide between mind and world.