I provide an explication of the content and method of Husserl’s phenomenology, explicating the ideas of bracketing and reduction and of descriptive, eidetic and transcendental phenomenology. In the process I set out his ideas of act intentionality, of co-intending and horizons and of active and passive constitution. I then give an account of how Merleau-Ponty adopts and adapts Husserl’s ideas and methodology, recasting phenomenology as an existential and genetic but nonetheless transcendental enterprise. I go on to outline his account of the scientistic and physicalistic picture of the world presented by what he calls objective thought, his major target from the outset. Against this backdrop, I show that he opposes objective thought because it either reduces consciousness to a physical body in a determined world (as empiricism) or takes it as something that acts from above on a physical and agency-neutral body in a similarly determined world (as intellectualism).

Chapter 4 develops Merleau-Ponty’s perspectival account of experience. It shows how Merleau-Ponty’s claim that perception has a different structure to what he calls ‘objective thought’ can be derived from his interpretation of Kant’s paradox of symmetrical objects. It looks at how this difference in structure leads to Merleau-Ponty’s distinctive accounts of perspectival depth and orientation in space, before returning to Kant to show how Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception as having a figure-background structure leads to substantial divergences from Kant’s account of the constitution of the object (in doing so, it reconstructs a sustained argument against Kant’s transcendental deduction from fragmentary comments throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work). It also shows that the model of determination developed by Merleau-Ponty, while relying on context, differs significantly from Hegel’s account of determination, and supplements deficiencies in Sartre’s account.