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From: gal2@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Jacob Galley)
Subject: Re: What if x had lived longer?
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Date: Sun, 11 Jun 1995 22:13:24 GMT
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(This is my second attempt at posting this.  If two copies appear,
color me dorkly.)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty would have contributed much to cognitive science
if he had lived longer.  I have read some of his preliminary notes to
books that he never wrote, in _The Primacy of Perception_ (a
collection of some of his minor works published by Northwestern).  He
seems to have had very interesting theories of truth and of linguistic
meaning up his sleeve, extensions of his theory that perception and
action are ultimately indistinguishable in the interplay between an
organism and the world.  If he had lived a little longer he probably
would have made an attempt to relate his work to psychology and
cybernetics.  He seems to have been moving in that direction at the
time of his early death.

I think he will become very influential as more cognitive scientists
and artificial-lifers become aware of phenomenology.  Echoes of his
work can be found in the writings of Francisco Varela and others---for
instance, _The Embodied Mind_ by Varela, Evan Thompson, and Elanor
Rosch (MIT 1992?).

Jake.

-- 
Philosophers cannot purely and simply forget what psychology, sociology, ethno-
graphy, history and psychiatry have taught us about the conditioning of human
behavior. It would be a very romantic way of showing one's love for reason to
base its reign on the disavowal of acquired knowledge.       <-- Merleau-Ponty
