Anya Daly

Mental disorders are increasingly understood as involving complex alterations of self that emerge from dynamical interactions of constituent elements, including cognitive, bodily, affective, social, narrative, cultural and normative aspects and processes. An account of self that supports this view is the pattern theory of self (PTS). The PTS is a non-reductive account of the self, consistent with both embodiedenactive cognition and phenomenological psychopathology; it foregrounds the multi-dimensionality of subjects, stressing situated embodiment and intersubjective processes in the formation of the selfpattern. Indications in the literature already demonstrate the viability of the PTS for formulating an alternative methodology to better understand the lived experience of those suffering mental disorders and to guide mental health research more generally. This article develops a flexible methodological framework that front-loads the self-pattern into a minimally structured phenomenological interview. We call this framework 'Examination of Self Patterns' (ESP). The ESP is unconstrained by internalist or externalist assumptions about mind and is flexibly guided by person-specific interpretations rather than predetermined diagnostic categories. We suggest this approach is advantageous for tackling the inherent complexity of mental health, the clinical protocols and the requirements of research.

The notion of a self-pattern, as developed in the pattern theory of self (Gallagher, 2013), which holds that the self is best explained in terms of the kind of reality that pertains to a dynamical pattern, acknowledges the importance of neural dynamics, but also expands the account of self to extra-neural (embodied and enactive) dynamics. The pattern theory of self, however, has been criticized for failing to explicate the dynamical relations among elements of the self-pattern (e.g., Kyselo, 2014; Beni, 2016; de Haan et al., 2017); as such, it seems to be nothing more than a mere list of elements. We'll argue that the dynamics of a self-pattern are reflected in three significant and interrelated ways that allow for investigation. First, a self-pattern is reflectively reiterated in its narrative component. Second, studies of psychiatric or neurological disorders can help us understand the precise nature of the dynamical relations in a self-pattern, and how they can fail. Third, r...

Since the seminal work of Jaspers in the early 20 th century, phenomenology has proven immensely valuable in the therapeutic context to better understand anomalous experience and psychopathology. Now in the 21 st century, 'mindfulness' is firmly established as one of the key treatment methods to bring more balance and insight into the lives of individuals challenged with mental health issues. Phenomenology and Buddhist mindfulness come together in the foregrounding of sensation, bodily awareness and fine-tuned attention to experience; attentive perception is thus the methodological meeting point between the two traditions. This paper asks the question-how can the successes of mindfulness in the therapeutic context be accounted for? We know it is of benefit, but why is this the case? And so, in a 'reverse-engineering' move we consider specifically the role of presence and propose that some mental health issues can be viewed as either a failure of presence or a refusal of presence; for example, with presence to self (depersonalisation) and with presence in the world (derealisation). Symptoms then can be understood as not only giving evidence of the breakdown in presence, but they may also be understood as sustaining the lack of presence as a coping strategy to avoid confronting suffering. While the psychiatric patient may struggle to maintain the sense of presence, it is crucial to the processes of understanding and healing that the psychiatrist/ therapist brings a robust attentive presence to the encounter with the individual experiencing mental health challenges. How is this attentive presence, a presence for another , achieved and sustained in this encounter? Key to answering this question is consideration of the nature and role of attentive perception and mindfulness in establishing presence. And this is where phenomenology intersects in interesting ways with Buddhist meditational practices.

The Sovereign gaze of the human subject has predominated in natural science and aesthetics across representations of animality and animal lifeworlds. Nonetheless, exceptions to such sovereign gazes, characterised by distantiation, hierarchies, dichotomies of gazer and gazed-at, are found in the work of von Uexküll and da Vinci, in the exceptional quality of attention they bring to their tasks; a transformative attention, revealing as Merleau-Ponty describes "a strange kinship" of interanimality.

https://revuecaptures.org/article-dune-publication/%E2%80%98strange-kinship%E2%80%99-interanimality

The full special issue Animaux et Figurations Animales, with abstracts;

https://revuecaptures.org/dossier/animaux-et-figurations-animales

This paper addresses the persistent philosophical problem posed by the amoralist-one who eschews moral values-by drawing on complementary resources within phenomenology and care ethics. How is it that the amoralist can reject ethical injunctions that serve the general good and be unpersuaded by ethical intuitions that for most would require neither explanation nor justification? And more generally, what is the basis for ethical motivation? Why is it that we can care for others? What are the underpinning ontological structures that are able to support an ethics of care? To respond to these questions, I draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty, focusing specifically on his analyses of perceptual attention. What is the nature and quality of perceptual attention that underwrite our capacities or incapacities for care? I proceed in dialogue with a range of philosophers attuned to the compelling nature of care, some who have also drawn on Merleau-Ponty and others who have examined the roots of an ethics of care inspired or incited by other thinkers.

Full abstract.
This paper takes as its point of departure Merleau-Ponty's assertion not long before his untimely death in 1961 that "everything will have to begin again, in politics as well as in philosophy" (Merleau-Ponty in Person). It is well known that in pursuing his later work Merleau-Ponty signalled the need for a reconfiguration of his philosophical vision so that it was no longer caught in Cartesianism and the philosophy of consciousness. This required a turn towards ontology through which he consolidated two key ideas that were already implicit in the earlier work: firstly, a thoroughgoing interdependence articulated in his reversibility thesis and the ontology of 'flesh'; and secondly, a radical contingency at the heart of existence. And it is important to recognise that these ideas are delineating the same world; they are offering interdependent lenses through which to understand this world. This paper seeks to interrogate the implications for these ideas in the domain of politics in general and specifically with regard to the notions of humanism and human progress. Relatedly, I seek to address the question-how might a recognition of ontological interdependence and radical contingency support the viability of a flourishing democracy? Merleau-Ponty's early political work was concerned with the political issues of his day, notably, Nazism, Marxism and the status of humanism, and did not engage extensively with these emerging onto-political concerns. Nonetheless, there are indicative reflections in the writings and interviews; the political implications of his ontological interrogations become more thematic in the later works. There is thus no rupture as such between the earlier works and the later ones with regard to the direction of his philosophical vision, although he did later distance himself from Marxism with the revelations of the gulags under Stalin and the Korean War. The overarching claim of this paper is that we need to rethink politics from the ground up beginning with the acknowledgement that ontology is political and that the political is intrinsically ontologically informed; and furthermore, that getting the ontology 'right' is a matter of discovery, and not theory choice as some claim. Perhaps through these interrogations the very notion of 'human progress' might be salvaged despite recent events, despite the erosion of trust due to the escalation of violence, the destruction of the biosphere, widespread poverty, the corruption of leaders, institutions and media, and despite the challenges faced by democracy, arguably the most evolved of political systems.

Full Abstract:
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/whp/ev/pre-prints/content-whp_ev_3319

This paper explores the underlying ontological bases for ethical behavior and ethical failure in the context of the vexed relationships between human animals and non-human animals by drawing on resources in phenomenology, social cognition and Buddhist philosophy. In agreement with Singer and the utilitarian project, I argue that the basis for ethical behavior with regard to animals is most effectively justified and motivated by considerations of sentience.  The definition of sentience has been refined since its traditional Benthamite formulation as the capacity to experience hedonic pleasure and pain as sensate creatures, with Mill’s more elaborated version and his distinction between lower and higher pleasures and more recently with Singer’s reformulation which adds the notion of interests. Nonetheless, the utilitarian account still misses crucial aspects of sentience. Buddhist ethics, unlike Western ethics, is from the beginning not focused solely on humans but encompasses all sentient beings. This inclusivity, in addition to the refined interrogations of the varieties of suffering, means that Buddhist philosophy is able to furnish a more nuanced understanding of sentience. Furthermore, from phenomenology, which has a number of significant commonalities with Buddhist philosophy, we learn that sentience tacitly includes the capacities for self-awareness and, I will argue, a plural self-awareness; not only does the ‘I’ belong to a ‘we’, but the ‘we’ is constitutive of the ‘I’. This ‘primordial we’ I propose provides the basis for rethinking the moral relations between human animals and non-human animals.  While I appreciatively acknowledge the impact that Singer’s work has made in this domain,  the utilitarian approach cannot philosophically achieve all that Singer sets out to achieve without an ontological account. Tellingly in more recent years Singer has advanced the notion of interests which goes beyond the strictly utilitarian brief in that ‘interests’ perforce belong to a subject and subjectivity perforce entails ontological considerations.  My aims are thus threefold: firstly, to argue for not only a more extended understanding of suffering in the account of sentience but an account that also includes self-awareness – any sentient being is the subject of a life; secondly, I propose that self-awareness includes a tacit awareness of the primordial ‘we’, the fundamental kinship we have with all subjects including non-human animals. I contend finally that we thus have an ontological basis in ‘interanimality’ to explain why we most often do and should care about all sentient beings.

This paper explores the issue whether feminism needs a metaphysical grounding, and if so, what form that might take to effectively take account of and support the socio-political demands of feminism; addressing these demands I further propose will also contribute to the resolution of other social concerns. Social constructionism is regularly invoked by feminists and other political activists who argue that social injustices are justified and sustained through hidden structures which oppress some while privileging others. Some feminists (Haslanger and Sveinsdóttir, 2011) argue that the constructs appealed to in social constructionism are real but not metaphysically fundamental because they are contingent. And this is exactly the crux of the problem-is it possible to sustain an engaged feminist socio-political critique for which contingency is central (ie. that things could be otherwise) and at the same time retain some kind of metaphysical grounding. Without metaphysical grounding it has been argued, the feminist project may be rendered nonsubstantive (Sider 2011; 2017). There has been much debate around this issue and Sider (as an exemplar of the points under contention) nuances the claims expressed in his earlier writings (2011) and later presents a more qualified account (2017). Nonetheless, I propose the arguments and critiques offered by the various parties continue to depend on certain erroneous assumptions and frameworks that are challengeable. I argue that fundamentality as presented in many of these current accounts, which are underpinned by the explicit or implicit ontologies of monism and dualism and argued for in purely rationalist terms which conceive of subjects as primarily reason-responding agents, reveal basic irresolvable problems. I propose that addressing these concerns will be possible through an enactivist account which, following phenomenology, advances an ontology of interdependence and reconceives the subject as first and foremost an organism immersed in a meaningful world as opposed to a primarily reason-responding agent. Enactivism is thus, I will argue, able to legitimize feminist socio-political critiques by offering a non-reductive grounding in which not only are contingency and fundamentality reconciled, but in which fundamentality is in fact defined by radical contingency. My paper proceeds in dialogue with feminists generally addressing this 'metaphysical turn' in feminism and specifically with Sally Haslanger and Mari Mikkola.

While on the one hand for Merleau-Ponty, ‘the perception of the other founds morality’; on the other, it is the rationalizing of perception by stripping it of empathic responsiveness, becoming an inhuman gaze, that allows ethical failure. Through his ground-breaking analyses of embodied percipience, Merleau-Ponty offers a powerful critique of the view from nowhere, the objectivist, disembodied, unsituated, purely rationalist view which underwrites all inhuman gazes.  Complicating and deepening these analyses, Merleau-Ponty also draws on gestalt theory, elaborating particularly on the roles of perspectivism, wholism and figure-ground structures in the perception of things and of others. It is Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with gestalt theory that informs the key claims of this essay, supported by diverse accounts and analyses of the underlying psychological dimensions and consequences of torture. Specifically, I will argue that while we can theoretically decompose perception in terms of gestalt structures to better understand the mechanisms of perceptual experience in general, we can also understand how it is possible to achieve an inhuman gaze through a rationalizing deconstructive process of perception; rather than ‘making’ others and worlds, these are ‘unmade’ for potentially violent and unethical ends.

“Interrogating Lived Experience”
Anya Daly
From The Philosopher, 2019, vol. 107, no. 1 ('Doing Philosophy').
Read more articles from The Philosopher, purchase this issue or become a subscriber.

What do we do when we do philosophy? And what should we do? What method in philosophy is likely to resolve puzzles and lead to reliable, insightful and potentially useful “truths”? As Stephen Mulhall has explained in his 2014 Grahame Lock Memorial Lecture, ‘in no subject other than philosophy is the basic nature of the subject (and so the core self-understanding of its practitioners) perennially not only open to question but actively in question.’ Mulhall also gives an analysis of the muddled and abysmal designations of “analytic philosophy” and “continental philosophy”, which have contributed significantly to the often vexed exchanges between philosophers who assert adherence to either of these camps; the upshot being that the designations themselves are somewhat bogus and confused oversimplifications. And so it is apposite that The Philosopher and its new editor, Anthony Morgan, set the theme for this first issue under his stewardship as doing philosophy. In what follows, I will give a brief account of the questions which are motivating my current research and how I go about addressing them.
Please click on the link below for full access to the article.
Daly, Anya. 2019. “Interrogating Lived Experience”. The Philosopher – Special Issue on ‘Doing Philosophy’ with Timothy Williamson. Winter 2019, Vol.107, Issue 1. ISSN 0967-6074
https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/daly

The central hypothesis of this paper is that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty offers significant philosophical groundwork for an ethics that honours key feminist commitments – embodiment, situatedness, diversity and the intrinsic sociality of subjectivity. Part 1 evaluates feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. Part 2 defends the claim that Merleau-Ponty's non-dualist ontology underwrites leading approaches in feminist ethics, notably Care Ethics and the Ethics of Vulnerability. Part 3 examines Merleau-Ponty's analyses of embodied percipience, arguing that these offer a powerful critique of the view from nowhere, a totalizing God's-eye-view with pretensions to objectivity. By revealing the normative structure of perceptual gestalts in the intersubjective domain, he establishes the view from

The notion of a self-pattern, as developed in the pattern theory of self (Gallagher, 2013), which holds that the self is best explained in terms of the kind of reality that pertains to a dynamical pattern, acknowledges the importance of neural dynamics, but also expands the account of self to extra-neural (embodied and enactive) dynamics. The pattern theory of self, however, has been criticized for failing to explicate the dynamical relations among elements of the self-pattern (e.g., Kyselo, 2014; Beni, 2016; de Haan et al., 2017); as such, it seems to be nothing more than a mere list of elements. We'll argue that the dynamics of a self-pattern are reflected in three significant and interrelated ways that allow for investigation. First, a self-pattern is reflectively reiterated in its narrative component. Second, studies of psychiatric or neurological disorders can help us understand the precise nature of the dynamical relations in a self-pattern, and how they can fail. Third, referencing predictive processing accounts, neuroscience can also help to explicate the dynamical relations that constitute the self-pattern.

The Inhuman Gaze and Perceiving Otherwise

A 3-day multidisciplinary conference spanning philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, sociology and aesthetics, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 6th – 9th June 2018; partly funded by Dr. Anya Daly’s IRC project [The Social Matrix: An investigation of the subjective bases of violence, destructiveness and ethical failure] and Dr. James Jardine’s IRC project [The Constitution of Personal Identity: Self-Consciousness, Agency and Mutual Recognition] and sponsored by the School of Philosophy and the School of Computer Science, University College Dublin.

https://theinhumangaze.com

This article explores the issue of homelessness from the perspective of someone who has experienced homelessness, as someone who has worked with the homeless and heard the stories of ‘our friends on the street’, as a mother distressed to see other mothers’ children, no matter their age, in such dire circumstances, and as a philosopher driven to interrogate the hidden assumptions and beliefs motivating our choices, judgments, and behavior. I wish to stress that homelessness must be addressed from the philosophical perspective not only with regard to the individual, but also with regard to the individual as belonging to the ‘we’. This ‘we’ must include all the people involved, from the homeless person laying out her swag under the bridge, to the policy-makers earning fabulous salaries. I’ll propose that a deeper understanding of what’s called ‘double incorporation’ is a crucial step towards galvanizing political will to implement solutions that have already been identified.

We must conceive of a primordial We [On] that has its own authenticity and furthermore never ceases but continues to uphold the greatest passions of our adult life and to be experienced anew in each of our perceptions. The Philosopher and his Shadow (S:175)

The first section of this chapter extends the arguments set down in Chapter Seven vindicating the ontological claim that primary empathy, fellow-feeling is constitutive of subjectivity. Here, Colwyn Trevarthen’s three tiered account of subjectivity/intersubjectivity provides a useful organising framework so that the various designations and processes of empathy can be mapped onto the subjective levels (Daly 2014) and it is the primordial ‘we’, of fellow-feeling, of primary empathy which is the ground for the other derivative modes. Furthermore, this primordial ‘we’ is not merely a cognitive apprehension of belonging to an intersubjective sphere, but it is crucially embodied so that the ‘I’ within the ‘we’ reveals a belonging to sex, family, race, species and arguably sentience. In the second section of this chapter, I return to Max Scheler’s seminal work The Nature of Sympathy. Because Merleau-Ponty did not address the issues of empathy extensively and because throughout his writings he references Scheler regularly and always favourably, I propose there would be sufficient concordance for a useful comparative analysis. The key test will be in whether Scheler’s treatment of empathy coheres with Merleau-Ponty’s ontological project. In the beginning of The Nature of Sympathy Scheler asserts that fellow-feeling (Mitgefühl) can never be the basis for an ethics, because it ‘can never do justice to the facts of moral life … [because it is] blind to value’ (Scheler 1954). But then contrarily, the title of Chapter X is ‘The Moral Value of fellow-feeling’. Such an inconsistency warrants closer examination. In the third section of the chapter, other objections to the empathy account of ethics are evaluated. I situate this reconfigured empathy account of ethics with regard to normative accounts; where do they converge and where do they diverge? Are they in the end compatible? Not only do I propose that primary empathy underwrites essential aspects of normative ethics – ‘the universalising principle’ of deontology and the ‘everyone considered’ of utilitarianism – but also that it offers a resolution to the problem of ethical motivation. In the final section, I explore the viability of the claim flagged in Chapter Seven, that there is no subject entirely devoid of primary empathy. If this is so, then how can we account for ethical failure? If primary empathy is constitutive of subjectivity, then what is happening when a subject appears to be devoid of empathy? Here I draw on some recent investigations in neuropsychology to support my claims (Decety 2013, Decety and Christen 2014, Eisenberg and Eggum 2009, Meltzoff and Decety 2003, Levy 2013, Fecteau and Pascual-Leone 2008, Baron-Cohen 2011, Fuchs and Schlimme 2009, Batson 2009, Trevarthen 2012, Frith and Gallotti 2013, Happe and Frith 2014, Frith and Wolpert 2003). I argue that in cases wherein the empathic deficiency cannot be regarded as constitutional, thus excluding cases of psychopathology, the will to nullify or block empathy is imposed from the tertiary level of subjectivity. The capacity to affectively disembody experience and function purely through the rational capacities, positively facilitates highly task-focussed activities such as bomb-disposal or surgery, but may equally render the subject susceptible to the seductions of destructive rationalisations such as those at work in objectification and reification. Furthermore, a key issue in the current debates that is often overlooked is that there are two empathic modes; cognitive empathy and affective empathy. These continue to be regularly conflated in the literature, thereby compounding the confusions. As previously discussed, psychopaths have highly functioning cognitive empathic capacities which facilitates their manipulation of others, whereas what is relevant in order for empathy to serve moral aims is the responsiveness of affective empathy.

This is the penultimate version.  Please cite as follows -
Daly, Anya.  (2018) Merleau-Ponty's Aesthetic Interworld: From Primordial Percipience to Wild Logos.  Philosophy Today, Vol 62 (3).

The overall aim of this paper is to defend the value of the arts as uniquely instructive regarding philosophical questions. Specifically, I aim to achieve two things: firstly, to show that through the phenomenological challenge to dualist and monist ontologies the key debate in aesthetics regarding subjective response and objective judgment is reconfigured and resolved. I argue that Merleau-Ponty's analyses complement and complete Kant's project. Secondly, I propose that through his phenomenological interrogations of the creative process the issue of the viability of his relational non-dualist ontology is defended against accusations that it has not gone beyond dualism or that it has collapsed into a monism. Since Plato's infamous 'banishment' of the mimetic poets from his ideal city-state, the expressive arts have had a chequered history in philosophy, at times elevated to the divine and at other times treated with disdain for their purported inability to offer truth and with suspicion for their seductive charms. Neither of these extreme stances is finally defensible? Nonetheless, there is both a mystery in the arresting power of great art and opacity in the creative process that defy ready explanations. The overall aim of this paper is to defend the value of the arts as uniquely instructive regarding philosophical questions. Specifically, I aim

""Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility thesis is the thesis that self, other and world are inherently relational; that there is interdependence at the level of ontology. What is at stake in the reversibility thesis is whether it is able to overcome skeptical objections in assuring real communication and at the same time avoid any collapse into solipsism in assuring real difference; the Other must be a genuine, irreducible Other.

The initial criticism of this thesis of reversibility is that across the various domains of reversibility, symmetry and reciprocity are not guaranteed. I argue that this is a non-problem; that rather the potentialities for asymmetry and non reciprocity in fact guarantee the irreducibility of the Other; reversibility needs to be appreciated as dialectical or aesthetic, rather than as a literal or ‘mechanistic’ reversal. A further criticism targets the viability of ontology itself, whether alterity as irreducible otherness is ever compatible with ontology.

This paper considers the above objections from two of Merleau-Ponty’s contemporaries – Claude Lefort  and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who also drew on the work of Husserl, and developed a philosophy which while intersecting with Merleau-Ponty’s at important junctures, nonetheless arrived at an entirely different destination.  By way of response, I argue alongside Martin Dillon against the objections of Lefort, and alongside Dan Zahavi against the objections of Levinas. Both of these interpreters of Merleau-Ponty, I propose remain faithful to the core directions and spirit of his endeavours without becoming diverted by the less significant inconsistencies.
""

The arguments advanced in this paper are the following. Firstly, just as the three intersubjective levels, primary, secondary, and tertiary, mapped out different modes of access, so too response is similarly structured, from direct primordial responsiveness, to that informed by shared pragmatic concerns and narrative contexts, to that which demands the distantiation afforded by representation. Secondly, I propose that empathy is an essential mode of intentionality, integral to the primary level of subjectivity/ intersubjectivity, which is crucial to our survival as individuals and as a species.  Further to this last point, I argue that empathy is not derived on the basis of intersubjectivity, nor does it merely disclose intersubjectivity, rather it is constitutive of intersubjectivity at the primary level. Empathy is a direct, irreducible intentionality separable in thought from the other primary intentional modes of perception, rationality, memory and imagination, but co-arising with these. In regard to the inter-personal level, the concrete relations with others, primary empathy is both the ground for the possibility of the secondary manifestations – pity, sympathy, perspective taking, etc,. and motivates them. Thirdly, it is the movement in the core of subjectivity initially generated by shifting attention between the ‘I’ and ‘we’ perspectives and later ‘solidified’ through affect to become shifting identification, which opens up the intersubjective domain.  So we can affirm that we are not only born into sociality but our sociality goes to the roots of our being as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have claimed.

This book draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, psychology, neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy to explicate Merleau-Ponty's unwritten ethics. Daly contends that though Merleau-Ponty never developed an ethics per se, there is significant textual evidence that clearly indicates he had the intention to do so. This book highlights the explicit references to ethics that he offers and proposes that these, allied to his ontological commitments, provide the basis for the development of an ethics. In this work Daly shows how Merleau-Ponty's relational ontology, in which the interdependence of self, other and world is affirmed, offers an entirely new approach to ethics. In contrast to the 'top-down' ethics of norms, obligations and prescriptions, Daly maintains that Merleau-Ponty's ethics is a 'bottom-up' ethics which depends on direct insight into our own intersubjective natures, the 'I' within the 'we' and the 'we' within the 'I'; insight into the real nature of our relation to others and the particularities of the given situation. Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity is an important contribution to the scholarship on the later Merleau-Ponty which will be of interest to graduate students and scholars. Daly offers informed readings of Merleau-Ponty's texts and the overall approach is both scholarly and innovative. Anya Daly spent five years in France researching and teaching across various disciplines in undergraduate, masters and doctoral programs, returning to Australia in 2010. Since then she has been based in Melbourne where she has taught on a number of the undergraduate programs in the Philosophy Department at the University of Melbourne. Her research continues to be focused on the nexus phenomenology, neuroscience and psychology, specifically with regard to perception, destructiveness and ethical failure. Her additional research interests include creativity, aesthetics, the philosophy of psychiatry and Buddhist philosophy.

Endorsements of Book: Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity, 2016
1. “In this careful and perceptive work Daly draws out the ethical implications of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the relations between self and other. Clear and engaging, she puts her account in conversation with key aspects of contemporary thought. Highly recommended”. 
Professor Kathleen Lennon, University of Hull

2. “Where better to find an embedded, embodied, enactive basis for ethics than in Merleau-Ponty!  Not just the embodied mind, but the empathic mind and the embodied person, always in relation to Others and characterized from the beginning by reversibility.   In regard to ethics, this is radically different from our standard (often individualistic) Western approaches, and Daly makes this clear through her insightful references to the Buddhist tradition.  Her analysis, like Merleau-Ponty’s own, is enriched by references to psychological and neuroscientific studies, and likewise innovative in her deft ability for constructing an integrated analysis.”
Professor Shaun Gallagher, Philosophy, University of Memphis

3. “Anya Daly addresses for the first time a question as central as it is difficult: that of the place and significance of ethics in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. She approaches this not only from the work of Merleau-Ponty, of which she is perfectly acquainted, but also effectively drawing on major English-speaking philosophers, as well as recent developments in neurobiology. Written in a lively and measured style, this book indisputably sheds new light on Merleau-Ponty and contributes significantly to the question of the foundation of ethics.”
Professor Renaud Barbaras, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

4. “Daly has written an original, scholarly and provocative book, defending Merleau-Ponty’s unique emphasis on embodiment, perception and expression, and exploring critically his account of the mutual involvement between self, other and world, founded in empathic fellow-feeling, leading to a comprehensive philosophy of intersubjectivity. Daly’s synoptic account is a must read for all interested in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodied subjectivity.”
Professor Dermot Moran, University College Dublin

"Ecology of the Brain: The Phenomenology and Biology of the Embodied Mind" (Fuchs, 2018) joins a growing body of writings which presents a serious and compelling challenge to the neuro-centrism and physicalist reductionism that has been predominant in recent philosophy of mind and in the human sciences. This volume will not only be relevant to researchers interested in the philosophy of mind and the role to be played by the human sciences in this domain, but it will also be a valuable addition to any psychiatric training program. It complements the pioneering work of Karl Jaspers and offers a much needed antidote to the explicit or implicit Cartesianism and physicalist reductionism that still persists in many psychiatric writings, research programs and approaches to clinical practice. As Fuchs alerts, the failure to appreciate the organism’s or individual’s embeddedness in an environment, in a world, has stymied efforts to advance psychiatric theory and practice and we can also say this failure has contributed to the current crisis in legitimacy of psychiatry (Daly and Gallagher 2019). Despite hopes and ambitions that neuroscience might rescue psychiatry from this crisis, it is increasingly clear that it cannot deliver on this promise as long as researchers and clinicians ignore the life-world (das Umwelt) and neglect the concept of life itself as Fuchs proposes. An ecological approach to understanding the brain is thus crucial so as to address these deficiencies.

Here is the read online only link:
https://rdcu.be/buAe6

This book draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, psychology, neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy to explicate Merleau-Ponty's unwritten ethics. Daly contends that though Merleau-Ponty never developed an ethics per se, there is significant textual evidence that clearly indicates he had the intention to do so. This book highlights the explicit references to ethics that he offers and proposes that these, allied to his ontological commitments, provide the basis for the development of an ethics. In this work Daly shows how Merleau-Ponty's relational ontology, in which the interdependence of self, other and world is affirmed, offers an entirely new approach to ethics. In contrast to the 'top-down' ethics of norms, obligations and prescriptions, Daly maintains that Merleau-Ponty's ethics is a 'bottom-up' ethics which depends on direct insight into our own intersubjective natures, the 'I' within the 'we' and the 'we' within the 'I'; insight into the real nature of our relation to others and the particularities of the given situation. Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity is an important contribution to the scholarship on the later Merleau-Ponty which will be of interest to graduate students and scholars. Daly offers informed readings of Merleau-Ponty's texts and the overall approach is both scholarly and innovative. Anya Daly spent five years in France researching and teaching across various disciplines in undergraduate, masters and doctoral programs, returning to Australia in 2010. Since then she has been based in Melbourne where she has taught on a number of the undergraduate programs in the Philosophy Department at the University of Melbourne. Her research continues to be focused on the nexus phenomenology, neuroscience and psychology, specifically with regard to perception, destructiveness and ethical failure. Her additional research interests include creativity, aesthetics, the philosophy of psychiatry and Buddhist philosophy.