TY - THES ID - 136755626 TI - Overcoming the Bifurcation of Nature : Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred North Whitehead. AU - Hamrick, William S. AU - Breeur, Roland AU - Vandevelde, Antoon AU - Van der Veken, Jean AU - Burke, J. Patrick AU - Cloots, André. AU - K.U.Leuven. Hoger instituut voor Wijsbegeerte PY - 2008 PB - Leuven K.U.Leuven. Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:136755626 AB - The subject of this study is the overcoming of what Alfred North Whitehead criticized as "the bifurcation of nature" into "nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness." On this view, what passes into our eyes, light waves, is not visible, and what is visible-colors and other "secondary" qualities-is not there. Thus, we have "two systems of reality," as Whitehead observed, nature as scientific object and nature as perceived, the one being "true and not perceived" and the other "perceived and not true" (Jean Wahl). This doctrine is "the original sin of modern epistemology" (Jan Van der Veken). The bifurcation took different and even contradictory forms throughout modern (seventeenth- and eighteenth-century) philosophy, and quickly extended beyond appearances and reality to bifurcations of bodies and minds, matter and spirit, efficient and final causes, and even the relation of God and the world. The impetus created by the various forms of the bifurcation led to a philosophical and scientific commitment powerful enough to reach well into the twentieth-century. This thesis is a critical examination of the way that Maurice Merleau-Ponty attempted to overcome that view of nature and our place within it, and of the ways that Whitehead's process philosophy did help, and could have further helped, Merleau-Ponty formulate his alternative view. A Whiteheadian influence on Merleau-Ponty is missing from his earlier phenomenological texts, as he did not explicitly borrow from Whitehead until his Nature lectures at the Collège de France. Merleau-Ponty knew little about the technicalities of Whitehead's philosophy, but, at the end of his life, he felt some consonance with Whiteheadian themes, such as "the passage of nature," "brute facts," and the "fallacy of simple location." Both thinkers came together conceptually to argue against the bifurcation in their reactions to the same philosophical sources in modern philosophy, and they arrived at a convincing alternative to the bifurcation even though they approached the problem from considerably different philosophical perspectives. It is clear that Whitehead tried to overcome the bifurcation of nature in a far more systematic way than Merleau-Ponty, and that Whitehead's more elaborate conceptuality shows more precisely how the bifurcation can be overcome. This expansion would be in line with that for which Merleau-Ponty was searching in his late ontology, but which he unhappily enough was not able to develop in a systematic way. This thesis attempts to show that what Merleau-Ponty learned from his limited reading of Whitehead's texts did help him formulate his later ontology, as well as that a greater familiarity with Whitehead's process metaphysics could have offered him more adequate and precise conceptual support. ER -