Abstract

The contributions of Dewey and Merleau-Ponty exhibit a kinship rarely seen in philosophy. This uncanny similarity between two thinkers who shared no known direct contact and were separated by an ocean becomes less mysterious considering their shared situation and approach grounded in lived experience. For Dewey, the denotative-empirical method is a means to study things "on their own account" (Experience and Nature, LW 1:14). Through selective emphasis, the inquirer is open within primary experience to the expressive movement of the object of inquiry. Merleau-Ponty's notion of interrogation seeks a similar aim in motivating Being to creatively express itself. In the act of expression, the reverberations of nature... Read More.