Merleau-Ponty innovated when giving primacy to the body and perception in his philosophical proposal. Within the field of health, his thinking gives us access to the knowledge gained from the corporeality of individuals with chronic diseases. The objective of this study was to expand the understanding of phenomena associated with the daily use of medication, which includes increasingly complex drug regimes, through the lens of Merleau-Ponty. To this end, we described the research steps anchored in his phenomenological philosophy and structured them in the form of a cascade, beginning with the definition of phenomenology as a new form of epistemology, existence as a paradigm, and the body as a theory. Furthermore, the methodology included the use of existential structures, namely, time, space, relationships with others, and sexuality, connected through the intentional arc to reach an understanding of the phenomenon of medication use.

Experiences of absence are common in everyday life, but have received little philosophical attention until recently, when two positions regarding the nature of such experiences surfaced in the literature. According to the Perceptual View, experiences of absence are perceptual in nature. This is denied by the Surprise-Based View, according to which experiences of absence belong together with cases of surprise. In this paper, I show that there is a kind of experience of absence—which I call frustrating absences—that has been overlooked by the Perceptual View and by the Surprise Based-View and that cannot be adequately explained by them. I offer an alternative account to deal with frustrating absences, one according to which experiencing frustrating absences is a matter of subjects having desires for something to be present frustrated by the world. Finally, I argue that there may well be different kinds of experiences of absence.

No abstract

Burge (1979) famously argued that one can have thoughts involving a concept C even if one’s understanding of C is incomplete. Even though this view has been extremely influential, it has also been taken by critics as less than clear. The aim of this paper is to show that the cases imagined by Burge (1979) as being ones in which incomplete understanding of concepts is involved can be made clearer given an account of direct concept ascriptions—such as “Peter has the concept of arthritis”—according to which these ascriptions are to be analysed in terms of ascriptions of the knowledge of what something is. The upshot is that the cases imagined by Burge (1979) can be explained is terms of the idea of subjects knowing in part what something is.

This chapter discusses Merleau-Ponty’s account of synaesthesia as presented in his Phenomenology of Perception. The chapter argues, first, that this account is unsuccessful in dealing with what will be called synaesthesia proper. Second, the chapter argues that this account also falls short of illuminating two other forms of sensory union, namely crossmodal correspondences and crossmodal mental imagery. Finally, the chapter argues that, despite these shortcomings, Merleau-Ponty’s account is still relevant today, for in his discussion of the phenomenon of synaesthesia he happens to identify a form of sensory union—here called sensorimotor crossmodality—that has been overlooked by contemporary accounts.