Branches of Philosophy Podcast · Philosophy Cognitive Science

[203] The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity By Scott L. Marratto

·35 min·2 clips

The self emerges when the other's intention inhabits my body and meaning passes body to body.

1. Branches of Philosophy Podcast [203], "The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity By Scott L. Marratto," examines subjectivity, embodiment, and intercorporeality. 2. The hosts center Scott Elmerado's book The Intercorporeal Self and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose philosophy gives the episode its main framework. 3. The episode asks whether the self is a thinking substance in the head or a lived relation among body, world, and others. 4. Descartes' res cogitans appears as the classic view of a non-physical thinking thing separate from body and world. 5. The hosts contrast that with reductionist neuroscience, where the self is described as brain states, neurons, or an epiphenomenon. 6. Both the Cartesian and reductionist pictures are criticized for treating the self as an object that can be studied from outside or from inward introspection. 7. Situated cognition enters as a challenge to that objectifying model because it treats knowing as grounded in behavior, sensorimotor loops, and direct engagement. 8. Murado distinguishes an epistemological sense of situatedness from an ontological sense that asks how a world comes to be for a subject. 9. The episode then turns to perception in space, using depth as an example of how Merleau-Ponty rejects inference from 2D images to a 3D world. 10. Perception is described as action-oriented, with depth tied to movement, reach, effort, and the body's practical possibilities. 11. Merleau-Ponty still keeps a stratum of sensation, which the hosts describe as a vague beckoning that resists complete absorption by meaning. 12. That passivity matters because the world can surprise us and resist projection, rather than being fully generated by our intentions. 13. The episode distinguishes spatiality of position, meaning objective coordinates, from spatiality of situation, meaning lived space organized around the body's "I can." 14. Cutting and Vishton's work on depth cues is presented as supporting situation sensitivity, with binocular vision and atmospheric haze mattering differently across contexts. 15. J.J. Gibson's ecological psychology and affordance perception appear as another support, since a chair affords sitting and a handle affords grasping. 16. The hosts emphasize that Merleau-Ponty treats the body's limits as important, because incompossible senses such as sight and hearing reveal a depth that cannot be fully unified. 17. Body schema and body image are separated, with Gallagher and Zahavi disagreeing over whether basic bodily awareness is non-conscious performance or pre-reflective consciousness. 18. Learning, infancy, and gesture show the same pattern, from Kermoyan and Campos on locomotion to Mead on how social gesture becomes signification. 19. The tone is academic, explanatory, and discussion-based, with careful definitions, named examples, and extended back-and-forth between the hosts. 20. Listeners who like phenomenology, embodiment, or philosophy of mind will get the most from it, while listeners wanting light banter or a fast recap may skip it.

As heard by us

A body-first account of why the self reaches beyond the mind.

The Intercorporeal Self takes a familiar but slippery question and keeps it readable: what if the self is not a sealed mind, but something lived through the body, perception, and relation?

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Why you'd press play

If you want Merleau-Ponty without the fog, start here.

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