PhD student Júlia Diniz presents at international conference in Lisbon, Portugal

Congratulations Júlia!

14 October 2022

PhD student Júlia Diniz presented a paper at the conference Merleau-Ponty: Institution – Ontology – Politics that took place at School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon September 26-28, 2022. The conference sought to bring scholars together to assess Merleau-Ponty’s legacy and potentiality beyond the frontiers of phenomenology and to broaden the scope of his philosophical influence. Júlia’s paper was titled “Putting Things Back into Nature: Merleau‑Ponty and Institution at the Edge of Phenomenology” and here is the abstract:

"Whether Merleau-Ponty’s later project can be seen as a continuation of his pre-phenomenological and phenomenological works, or rather as a rupture, one thing can be agreed upon: the question of intersubjectivity is present throughout his oeuvre. In this presentation, I intend to show that it is through the question of the appearing of the alter ego, that Merleau-Ponty first faces, in the Phenomenology of Perception, a ‘limit of phenomenology’. This limit, as I intend to make clear, is the limit of ‘constitution’ not only in its traditional version (Kant), but also in its phenomenological formulation. However, Merleau-Ponty’s encounter with this limit is not followed by an abandonment of the questions of constitution and intersubjectivity, but rather by an intensification of them. In this sense, I argue that it is the critique of the philosophies of consciousness and the radicalization of intersubjectivity that guide the passage beyond (or beneath) phenomenology."