Browsing by Author "Wait, Eldon Christopher"

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    The concept of the lived world : an introduction to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty
    (1974) Wait, Eldon Christopher
    The task we have set ourselves in this thesis is not to interpret or translate Merleau-Ponty's expressions but rather to re-create his philosophy, avoiding as far as possible the actual expressions he used, not because we find any fault with them but because we wish to re-create the conditions under which they can appear in their original urgency and vitality. We must understand Merleau-Ponty by being present at the birth of his philosophy, to experience the philosophy "from the inside" Our approach must be distinguished from a purely historical or a phychological one. We do not wish to introduce the thought of Merleau-Ponty by an examination of pre-phenomenological thought, nor do we wish to concern ourselves with his personal development which led to the writing of "The Phenomenology of Perception". Our approach is phenomenological. We wish to understand Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology as itself an intentional movement, as the "coming about" of the structure of intentionality, or as we will refer to it, the coming about of the imperfect unity, or the informal essence. Our discussions of the psychological ego and the transcendental ego are important not only as an historical introduction, but because psychologism and transcendentalism are respectively the noetic and noematic poles of this intentional movement.
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    The structure of linguistic behaviour : using evidence from aphasiology to corroborate and develop Merleau-Ponty's theory of language and intersubjectivity
    (1989) Wait, Eldon Christopher; Shutte, M F N
    The theme of this thesis occurred to me while reading Luria's Basic Problems of Neurolinguistics. Many of Luria's patients manifest forms of a disintegration of speech and of the understanding of speech, which resemble the disintegration of movement in space and perception of space of Goldstein's patient, Schneider, the case Merleau-Ponty described in so many of his arguments, particularly those in the chapter of the Phenomenology of Perception entitled "The spatiality of one's own Body and Motility". It seemed to me that I could analyse the speech syndromes Luria reveals, and Luria's explanations, in much the same way that Merleau-Ponty analysed Schneider's syndrome and the explanations offered by Goldstein and others. I felt that in this way I would be able to exhibit certain features of the speaking subject and its relations with others, in the same way that Merleau-Ponty revealed the spatiality of the body and its relations with the world. This seemed to me to be a useful project, firstly because of the central role that the problem of language plays in Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy and because the later reflections on language seem to presuppose such an analysis of pathological forms of speech.