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From: gal2@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Jacob Galley)
Subject: Re: What if x had lived longer?
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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 (see _The Primacy of Perception_, a
collection of some of his minor works published by Northwestern).  He
seems to have had a 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
cognitive psychology and cybernetics.  He seems to have been moving in
that direction at his early death.

I think he will become very influential as more cognitive scientists
become aware of phenomenology.  Echoes of his work can be found in the
work of Francisco Varela, 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
