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Patricia M. Locke & Rachel McCann (eds.) Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture. 294 pp. Ohio University Press, 2015. ISBN: 9780821421758. (Hardback). $64.00.
Though Merleau-Ponty died a half century ago, his thinking continues to stimulate a wide range of fields, including philosophy, psychology, health care, pedagogy, politics, architecture, art, ecology, feminism, geography, geometry, child development, and cognitive science, to name only the most evident. Throughout his own work, Merleau-Ponty was consistently a transdisciplinary thinker. But it is not only his range that is responsible for this broad impact. No, more influential to his ongoing importance was the deep acuity of his thought, and the radical significance of his project to get beneath the Cartesian dualism that had been the legacy of modernity and of its steering paradigm: Newtonian science. For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness and world are not distinct categories, but are so intertwined that each could be understood best only in relation with the other. Every year now, we see a new book arrive, elaborating the value of Merleau-Ponty's vision to yet another realm. Each is a welcome reminder of the power of his thinking; but more than that, each also reminds us of the still unfolding scope and impact of phenomenological thought In a world increasingly dominated by a reductionistic paradigm derived from neuroscience, these reminders are something to celebrate, and to savor. In that vein, let us thank Patricia Locke and Rachel McCann for their fine new addition to this ouvre, in which they adroitly trace "Merleau-Ponty's contribution to our understanding of place and architecture."
Their book is an edited collection, presenting the work of a dozen different authors, plus Locke's introduction. Its own "architecture" seems to have been built around the key idea of bringing together that which belongs together- much in the spirit of Merleau-Ponty (and phenomenology generally). I'd like to focus on six such "togethering" themes: First, their aim is to synthesize a phenomenology of place with a phenomenology of architecture. Locke...