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From Gestalt to Structure

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Early Analysis of the Human Sciences

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

This paper outlines the earliest writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: his proposals in the early 1930s which study a synthesis of science and philosophy as well as his first text, The Structure of Behavior (completed in 1938, published in 1942). The first section of the paper traces the historical development of his thought from a simple championing of the sciences (in contrast to the dominant neo-Kantian philosophy of the time) to a strongly critical stance toward any kind of reductionism in psychology. The second section describes how Merleau-Pomty’s critique of psychology’s overestimation of the ability to localize the causes of behavior leads him to limit the reach of scientific psychology. In conclusion, it outlines how his early idea of structure in psychology is offered as a solution to poles of naïve materialism in the sciences and abstract intellectualism in philosophy.

Key Words: behaviorism • Gestalt theory • Merleau-Ponty • phenomenology • scientism • structure

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 16, No. 4, 527-551 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354306066205


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