Timothy Mooney | University College Dublin (original) (raw)

Books by Timothy Mooney

Cambridge University Press, 2022

This is an advanced introduction to and an original interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s greatest wo... more This is an advanced introduction to and an original interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s greatest work. The reader is brought from the outset into the Kantian and Phenomenological traditions that Merleau-Ponty builds on in his existential philosophy of embodied perception, with this study demonstrating the centrality of the theory of the body schema in Phenomenology of Perception. Thanks to the schema’s motor intentionality our bodies inhabit and appropriate space. Our postures and perceptual fields are organised schematically when we move to realise our projects. In our actions this sub-conscious or operative intentionality functions in an integral union with our conscious or act intentionality. The theory of motor projection is fully compatible with the view that, as agents, we are at one with the bodies expressing our agency. It is shown that in Merleau-Ponty’s account our lived bodies are ineliminably expressive in being animated and outcome oriented through-and-through.

Routledge, 2002

This reader aims to make accessible to the English-Speaking world a representative selection of t... more This reader aims to make accessible to the English-Speaking world a representative selection of translations of primary readings of the phenomenological tradition, perhaps the most broadly influential movement of European Philosophy in the twentieth century. Phenomenology was inspired by the descriptive psychology formulated and practiced by Franz Brentano, and was inaugurated by Edmund Husserl in his breakthrough work Logical Investigations (1900/01). This radical method of approaching problems attracted some of the best minds of the modern age, and in one form or another it engaged with most of the competing philosophical currents of the era. The Phenomenology Reader constitutes the most comprehensive collection of primary texts from in this philosophical tradition that has been published to date. In presenting many of the core ideas expounded by the great phenomenologists themselves, it provides a first-hand account of the birth, consolidation and evolution of the movement. The editors have provided clear and accessible introductions to the all the thinkers and selections, together with up to date bibliographies of the primary and secondary literature.

Miscellaneous by Timothy Mooney

Never quite eclipsed by other and more fashionable approaches, the account of engaged awareness s... more Never quite eclipsed by other and more fashionable approaches, the account of engaged awareness set out in Phenomenology of Perception has come back into its own in recent years. The new movements of embodied and situated cognition owe much to it, and their leading proponents have been careful to acknowledge its importance. 1 In his magnum opus Maurice Merleau-Ponty exploits both physiology and psychology in the service of his project. He also draws on the diverse expressions

International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2015

A pivotal influence on modern European philosophies of interpretation and existence, Dilthey diff... more A pivotal influence on modern European philosophies of interpretation and existence, Dilthey differentiates the human sciences of understanding from the natural sciences of explanation. He explicates life as a flow of lived experience and as an individual and socio-historical nexus of knowing, feeling and willing. In his middle period he sees descriptive psychology as the foundational approach for understanding lived experience, but subsequently emphasizes the hermeneutics or systematic interpretation of outer expressions of life, from politics and law to literature and architecture. His insights into the temporality, historicity and finitude of life are developed further in his philosophy of worldviews.

The Leuven Philosophy Newsletter 15, 2007

Book Chapters by Timothy Mooney

The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness, 2023

Certain themes and conceptions in Merleau-Ponty’s later writings that overlap with the theory and... more Certain themes and conceptions in Merleau-Ponty’s later writings that overlap with the theory and practice of mindfulness can also be found in his earlier work. Though he regards the essentially embodied subject as a projective and self-transformative existent, he also sees many of our projects as solicited by things themselves with their unique perceptual styles. He proffers a kind of mindfulness that evokes much of the magic and wonder of childhood.

Perception and the Inhuman Gaze. Routledge, 2020

The contemporary notion of perception proper as directed towards the fully scientific image has b... more The contemporary notion of perception proper as directed towards the fully scientific image has been popularised by Paul and Patricia Churchland and was foreshadowed by Richard Avenarius. This approach has the remarkable aim of overcoming what it characterises as our neolithic legacy. With a dramatic shift in and expansion of human perceptual consciousness, we shall at last be in contact with true being. A phenomenological response will point to the indispensability of the lived world or lifeworld within which experience and knowledge take root and grow. In this light it can show that the eliminativist gaze is and must be a transient one. Any perceiver who is able to negotiate a world and who is motivated to do so works with beliefs that cannot be jettisoned and that are eminently justified. Two such fundamental beliefs - that the world is a realm of possibilities and that some of these are for oneself and some for others - are inseparable from one’s awareness of agency and bodily gearing into the macroscopic milieu.

Unconsciousness Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis. Springer, 2017

The notion of repression as active forgetfulness already found in Nietzsche and systematised by F... more The notion of repression as active forgetfulness already found in Nietzsche and systematised by Freud and his successors is employed in a distinctive manner by Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. By showing how we appropriate our environment towards outcomes and respond to other people, he contends, we can unearth hidden modes of operative intentionality. Two such modes are the motor intentional projection of action and the anonymous intercorporeality that includes touching and being touched. Each of these is an aspect of a past that was never a present. Merleau-Ponty does have something to say about pasts that were once present and that linger on in human life. Yet he shows little interest in the unconsciousness of psychoanalysis for its own sake. Psychoanalytic accounts of repression are assimilated into his theory of the body itself, serving merely as means for illustrating the latter. I suggest that this move follows on a conception of an integrated existent whose past acquisitions are remarkably enabling and untroubling.

Human Destinies. University of Notre Dame Press, 2013

In many of his readings from the 1960’s onwards, Derrida seeks to show that the meanings expresse... more In many of his readings from the 1960’s onwards, Derrida seeks to show that the meanings expressed in speech acts can readily transcend the self-present subject’s intentions. Comprehensive loss of control does not have to wait on graphic writing, his phrase for meaningful inscription on a material surface. My initial concern in this study is with something whose loss is held to wait on writing. This is the singularity or irreplaceable uniqueness of each person, which can only be conveyed, on Derrida’s account, in acts of speaking, gesturing and moving. Graphic writing leaves at best a trace of singularity that is estranged from the awareness and agency of its author. My other concern is with whether Derrida unduly privileges the singularity that is conveyed in the perception of the other’s living body, given that he seems to accord a quality of certainty to the experience of someone present in person. I begin with Derrida’s most familiar treatment of singularity, showing its place in his critique of phonocentrism, and also the way in which he gives a significant role to bodily presence in the indication of uniqueness, being close in this regard to the early Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I proceed to show that the beginnings of Derrida’s position can be found in one of his early commentaries on the later Husserl. Turning then to his interpretation of Rousseau, I ask whether his worked-out account is insensitive to exceptions in failing to admit the possibility that certain voluntary written productions can communicate singularity. I contend that his stance is defensible in this regard, but note that the difficulties pertaining to graphic writing can be extended to bodily presence. Derrida is aware of this, and I conclude by arguing that the putative certainty he attributes to the seeing of the other does not in fact pertain to his or her singularity.

The Human Voyage of Self-Discovery. Veritas, 2013

Close attention to the expressive flesh of sensibility in the Other and in oneself – if not yet t... more Close attention to the expressive flesh of sensibility in the Other and in oneself – if not yet to the originary ethical relationship established in sensibility - characterises the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with which Levinas displays an explicit familiarity in Totality and Infinity (1961). In his later years, Levinas composed two essays on the earlier thinker, ‘On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty’ (1983) and ‘Sensibility’ (1984). All three of his treatments are congruent, and all show a marked sensitivity to certain ways in which Merleau-Ponty’s analyses foreshadow and inspire his own. It is also argued by Levinas, however, that these analyses are oriented towards an epistemic account of experiencing the Other that hinders them from the outset. In finding the level of sensibility insufficient, Merleau-Ponty passes over one’s own original passivity in relation to him or her. In so doing he neglects his or her singularity, at every stage in his work from The Structure of Behaviour and Phenomenology of Perception through to The Visible and the Invisible. In this essay I hope to bring out what Levinas sees as of enduring worth in Merleau-Ponty’s work. I also wish to bring out the character of his critique of Merleau-Ponty, and show that it does seem to have purchase on the latter’s work, since his account of the originary passivity in early human life is indeed oriented towards the active and epistemic levels of which it is the precondition. Yet the orientation of early and anonymous life to stages beyond itself does not lead Merleau-Ponty to pass over its singular character as Levinas thinks he does. And the necessity of reaching the cognitive stage to recognise the transcendence of a singular Other – a stage that Levinas initially underplays - does not entail that a precondition of this stage can become the proper object of knowledge, or an object of cognition at all. Whilst it is Levinas’ claim to have drawn out the significance of such a past immemorial, Merleau-Ponty can accommodate such a view with an account of reflection that is cognisant of its structural limitations. He does not thereby foreshadow the Levinasian notion of responsibility, though he does begin to point towards conditions of possibility of responding ethically that will be made explicit by Paul Ricoeur.

Transcendence and Phenomenology. SCM Press, 2008

It is hardly an exaggeration to state that the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations is the most con... more It is hardly an exaggeration to state that the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations is the most contentious of Husserl’s later writings. In the French scene, one of the first extended critiques of the procedure of explicating the sense of the alter ego was set out by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He offers an alternative account of pairing, whilst rejecting what he takes to be the notion of analogical apperception. Levinas, by contrast, understands each move as exemplifying a philosophy that has culminated in a total suppression of alterity. He jettisons pairing and appresentation in the service of an approach that would recognise and foreground the inability of representation to capture or even approximate to the infinity of the Other. I argue that these criticisms are persuasive in part, but fail to do justice to Husserl’s conception of appresentation in particular. It has fallen to Jacques Derrida and other commentators to provide a more accurate interpretation of this notion and of its ultimate value. I begin by referring to some of Husserl’s remarks about encountering the Other in Ideas II and The Crisis, following this with an outline of his procedure in Cartesian Meditations. I then lay out the criticisms of pairing and appresentation by Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. I go on to expand upon these criticisms, whilst striving to show what their respective authors distort, dismiss prematurely, fail to reconstruct, and pass over altogether.

Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion. Fordham University Press, 2005

In this chapter I contend that Husserl’s investigations of reduction and givenness culminate in a... more In this chapter I contend that Husserl’s investigations of reduction and givenness culminate in a hubris and a humility that are not precisely where Marion might look for them. In the first section of this essay I set out the main points in Marion’s reading of Husserl. I begin by outlining the broadening and breakthrough achieved in the early work, and then consider the shift that Marion sees presaged in the principle of all principles and announced in the reduction. On the latter’s interpretation, appearing things are reduced to objects within the intentional immanence of consciousness. This process culminates in poor and flat phenomena that are modelled on the mathematizing horizons of the subject. I go on to give a short outline of Marion’s alternative notions of the interloqué and the saturated phenomenon. I commence the second section by looking briefly at what I call Husserl’s philosophical hubris, brought out in some of his remarks concerning the subjective a priori. Hubris lies in the interpretation of everything as a meaning for me, from God through to the world. It does not lie in the taking of beings as objects within fixed horizons, for Husserl shows a notable humility towards the things themselves in their respective appearances. Such humility is not a rarity, but is threaded through the explications that follow on the procedures of epoché and reduction. In the rest of this section, my concern is to show that, as Husserl’s thought develops, he pays ever more attention to the original modes of givenness of transcendent things. In the third and final section, I suggest that he also does justice to the character of the world as non-objective ground and horizon. Philosophical hubris will in no way preclude empirical humility.

God, Literature and Process Thought. Ashgate, 2002

In this chapter I argue that Derrida’s work - which has been shown to be heavily informed by syst... more In this chapter I argue that Derrida’s work - which has been shown to be heavily informed by systems theory and evolutionary biology - is not in fact shut off from the extra-conscious and extra-linguistic dimensions of actuality. I also suggest that his deconstructive approach is strikingly similar to Whitehead’s in rejecting essentialism, namely, the idea of fixed and determined essences that underlie accidental properties and changes. From a Derridean perspective, one might even see Whitehead’s alternative as insufficiently radical, since it seems to posit not just eternal objects and God, but a cosmology in which the most fundamental beings or “actual entities” undergo no essential changes or mutations in their respective histories. It is arguable, however, that the latter conclusion would only be consequent on a restrictive interpretation of the pathways of process possible in Whitehead’s metaphysics. In the first part of the essay I will briefly outline Whitehead’s account of essentialism and his proposed alternative. In the second I will turn to Derrida’s outline of “the centre” and ensuing deconstruction. Here I contend that his conceptions of différance and iteration have an applicability beyond language and consciousness, drawing on recent studies to illustrate this. In the final section, I note that Whitehead’s cosmology can be modified to meet the likely deconstructive objections in that it need not involve eternal objects or God, and I maintain that his subjective aims do not preclude essential changes or evolutionary mutations on the part of actual entities.

Journal Articles by Timothy Mooney

Philosophy and Theology 35(1/2), 2024

When Merleau-Ponty writes about belief in the Christian God, he does not explicate the belief phe... more When Merleau-Ponty writes about belief in the Christian God, he does not explicate the belief phenomenologically, whilst accepting Husserl’s claim that God cannot perceive panoptically or access human consciousness fully. For the later Merleau-Ponty the Christian idea of God incarnate does not separate the absolute from existence, and God is found wherever we gather in his name and ameliorate suffering. Yet Christianity remains haunted by the threat of acosmism, or the collapse of the real world into the divinity. I respond that believers are not concerned by full access to their first-person states. What is important is the way we are accessed. When we turn to Merleau-Ponty’s later conception of God, I contend that it draws on the resources of the Christian tradition it disavows and is open to a Nietzschean critique. Just as importantly it neglects the phenomenon of motivation. I suggest that William James does much to set out a first-person phenomenology of an inspirational belief in God that Merleau-Ponty neglects.

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 17, 2019

For Merleau-Ponty, reflection is essential to developed perceptual life, with our acquired skills... more For Merleau-Ponty, reflection is essential to developed perceptual life, with our acquired skills opening up the space for those activities in which we take a distance from things. Together with language, bodily skills facilitate the recognition and articulation of subject and object as the culmination of an integrated process of human development. Merleau-Ponty’s critique of objective thought nonetheless ensues in a dissociation of reflection from skilled coping. All reflections on the body are characterised as departures from practical perceptual engagement. Elsewhere, however, he points towards a rounder view of engaged perception that could accommodate what I describe as little reflections.

Philosophy Today 61(1), 2017

My aim in this essay is to show that Edith Stein’s influence on Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of... more My aim in this essay is to show that Edith Stein’s influence on Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception is predominantly through her early work On the Problem of Empathy. Though he does not give Stein due acknowledgement, Merleau-Ponty is closer to her philosophically than to her near contemporary Max Scheler, who receives much more attention. Whilst Stein’s influence is in the main difficult to disentangle from that of Husserl, some of her reformulations of and additions to the latter’s ideas are taken up recognisably in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. I focus on her accounts of bodily ownership and embodied willing and acting, and on her view of how the ownness of conscious human life is a condition of explicit self-awareness and empathic experience. I conclude by showing how her contributions are developed further by Merleau-Ponty, most notably in his reworking of the representation, decision and implementation model of human action.

Les Temps Modernes 669/70, 2012

I seek to show that, in his appropriation of certain Nietzschean ideas, Derrida does not commit h... more I seek to show that, in his appropriation of certain Nietzschean ideas, Derrida does not commit himself to the importation of the latter’s naturalising project. This is not just because Nietzsche’s ideas can be grafted onto other contexts and modified. More importantly, it is because Derrida never posits deconstruction as an approach that undoes the major arguments of transcendental phenomenology. One can show what these repress as they have been deployed, and beyond this the internal dislocations that ensue from their deployment, but do so without rejecting them. It is possible to report a trembling without assuming an eventual collapse, which can lead to one inhabiting all the more naively the original edifice one thought that one had abandoned. In this vein I will conclude by suggesting that Derrida’s refusal to naturalise consciousness does not commit him to a version of humanism in which we alone transcend the realm of beings-in-themselves.

Continental Philosophy Review 44(4), 2011

Merleau-Ponty’s explication of concrete or practical movement by way of the Schneider case could ... more Merleau-Ponty’s explication of concrete or practical movement by way of the Schneider case could be read as ending up close to automatism, neglecting its flexibility and plasticity in the face of obstacles. It can be contended that he already goes off course in his explication of Schneider’s condition. Rasmus Jensen has argued that he assimilates a normal person’s motor intentionality to the patient’s, thereby generating a vacuity problem. I argue that Schneider’s difficulties with certain movements point to a means of broadening Merleau-Ponty’s account of concrete movement, one that he broaches without exploiting. What could do more work is his recognition of a transposition capacity - and hence of a plasticity - in the healthy body’s skill schema. As well as avoiding vacuity, he could forestall the appearance of a dichotomy between practical coping and creativity.

Cambridge University Press, 2022

Routledge, 2002

International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2015

The Leuven Philosophy Newsletter 15, 2007

The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness, 2023

Perception and the Inhuman Gaze. Routledge, 2020

Unconsciousness Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis. Springer, 2017

Human Destinies. University of Notre Dame Press, 2013

The Human Voyage of Self-Discovery. Veritas, 2013

Transcendence and Phenomenology. SCM Press, 2008

Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion. Fordham University Press, 2005

God, Literature and Process Thought. Ashgate, 2002

Philosophy and Theology 35(1/2), 2024

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 17, 2019

Philosophy Today 61(1), 2017

Les Temps Modernes 669/70, 2012

Continental Philosophy Review 44(4), 2011

Philosophy and Social Criticism 36(6), 2010

Richard Rorty's muscular liberalism and pragmatic intolerance draws sustenance from Nietzsche as ... more Richard Rorty's muscular liberalism and pragmatic intolerance draws sustenance from Nietzsche as well as from the earlier American pragmatists. We set out the ways in which Rorty adopts and adapts their ideas. We go on to suggest that the cultural ethnocentrism that he advocates carries certain risks, and can be divorced all too easily from his own qualifications, particularly in the post 9-11 scenario. It is our contention that Isaiah Berlin's case for a pluralist liberalism warrants serious consideration as an alternative.

Husserl Studies 26(1), 2010

Husserl’s Logical Investigations has undergone explicitly conceptualist and non-conceptualist int... more Husserl’s Logical Investigations has undergone explicitly conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations. For Richard Cobb-Stevens, he has extended understanding into the domain of sensuous intuition, leaving no simple perceptions that are actually separated from higher-level understanding. According to Kevin Mulligan, Husserl does in fact sunder nominal and propositional seeing from the simple or straightforward—and yet interpretative—seeing of particulars. To see simply is not to exercise an individual meaning or a general concept. Arguing that Logical Investigations provides evidence for both views, I endeavour to show that the account of perceptual consciousness in Husserl’s subsequent work is far more clear and consistent. It is one of growing beyond the situation portrayed by Mulligan and into the one explicated by Cobb-Stevens. Though they are notionally separable, pre-conceptual syntheses at the passive and noematic levels are inevitably interwoven with conceptual and categorial articulations in a developed consciousness.

Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society, 6, 2005

In this essay I argue that Berkeley is a proto-phenomenologist. The term phenomenology will chief... more In this essay I argue that Berkeley is a proto-phenomenologist. The term phenomenology will chiefly be understood in terms of the approach of Edmund Husserl. Berkeley is attentive to the correct use of significations in philosophical exposition, the subjective character of experience, the motility of the perceiver and the transcendence of things. Like the phenomenologists he rejects materialism, naturalism and scepticism. He seeks to preserve the evidences of ordinary perception, setting out an account of scientific theory that can cohere with them.
In the first part of this essay I go through some of the more clear-cut ways in which Berkeley anticipates Husserl and some of the latter’s successors. In the second part I lay out their criticisms of Berkeley, also indicating what they hold in common. In the third and final part I consider some of the ways in which Berkeley can meet these criticisms, either readily or through certain qualifications, and I bring out his most significant contributions as a proto-phenomenologist. My aim is to show there are more than traces of the phenomenological attitude in Berkeley. In his efforts to save the appearances, he goes back to that world in which we live and breathe, if not quite have our being.

Philosophy Today 47(3), 2003

According to Kevin Mulligan, Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena gets the... more According to Kevin Mulligan, Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena gets the later wrong on almost every count, comprising an egregious example of a logic in the Parisian sense. In his reading Derrida seeks to undo the distinction, not just between the imagined word and the perceived word, but between imaginative and perceptual presentations in general. He also falls prey to the mentalist thesis that a subject is aware of the states he is in, a thesis not applicable to speech. Derrida goes on to make a failed psychologistic attempt to display the role of death in our uses of signs, and claims that sign and meaning idealities command the totality of their actual and possible instantiations and therefore represent these, such that the resulting mixed species has the magical properties of being active and efficient. I argue that Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl is far more accurate than Mulligan allows, and that his work is only susceptible to the final objection. His text needs to be read again so as to get the greater part of it right.

Philosophy and Social Criticism 25(5), 1999

A major charge levelled against Derrida is that of textual idealism - he effectively closes his d... more A major charge levelled against Derrida is that of textual idealism - he effectively closes his deconstructive approach off from the world of experience, the result being that it cannot be coherently applied to practical questions of ethics and politics. I argue that his writings on experience can be reconstructed as an empirical realism in the Husserlian sense. I begin by outlining Husserl’s account of sense perception and his empirical realism in very broad strokes. I then set out some of the major criticisms of Derrida proffered by Dallas Willard and Peter Dews and counter them with evidence from his own works. There is nothing outside the text where this denotes the socio-historical context and weave or textile of presence and absence constitutive of perception. I conclude by interpreting his account as a variant of Husserl’s that does not discernibly develop on or depart from the latter.

Sextant: Sexualities, Masculinities & Decolonialities 1(1), 2023

Germanistik in Ireland 12, 2018

The Philosophical Quarterly 64(256), 2014

In this work Felix Ó Murchadha seeks to explicate the Christian manner of being-in-theworld. Due ... more In this work Felix Ó Murchadha seeks to explicate the Christian manner of being-in-theworld. Due to the influence of the Church fathers, he claims, Greek thought in general and Platonism in particular have never been disturbed philosophically by the new religion. Yet in

International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20(4), 2012

Husserl Studies 28(2), 2012

Based on a Philosophy and Geography Conference held at Towson University in Maryland, this collec... more Based on a Philosophy and Geography Conference held at Towson University in Maryland, this collection seeks 'to investigate those processes of experience and meaning that inscribe urban and suburban landscapes.' The core notion underpinning the essays is that humans are at once producers and products of spatial relations. The passive dimension is quite correctly

Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society, 9, 2008

Phenomenological Inquiry, 26, 2002

International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10(3), 2002

Christina Howells has written the most organized and readable introduction to Derrida's work sinc... more Christina Howells has written the most organized and readable introduction to Derrida's work since that of Christopher Norris some eleven years before. Her book has the advantage of covering an extraordinarily wide range of Derrida's texts up to the recent past, not an easy task when his output continued unabated up to and beyond its publication. She remarks at the outset that her work cannot claim to be fully comprehensive (p. 3), but it is nearer to that goal than any study of this thinker I have yet encountered. In the course of six chapters one is taken through the various influences on Derrida that he has in turn subjected to deconstructive reading. These include phenomenology, structuralism and psychoanalysis. His views on language, literature and ethics and politics also get their own chapters. One down side of a fairly short introduction is that depth has to be sacrificed to breadth, and Howells' book is no exception. This is especially evident in Chapter 1, less so as the book progresses. As a whole, furthermore, her study is not strengthened by the fact that she makes no reference to those significant philosophical treatments of Derrida that have been written by Peter Dews,