CV by Laura McMahon
Public Philosophy by Laura McMahon
APA Blog: Women in Philosophy, 2020
Papers by Laura McMahon
Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology Vol 7 no 1, 122-44, 2024
The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Existentialism, eds. Kevin Aho, Megan Altman, and Hans Pedersen (Routledge), 93-105, 2024
Philosophical Health: Thinking as a Way of Healing (Bloomsbury), 91-102, 2024
Hannah Arendt and the History of Thought, eds. Daniel Brennan and Marguerite La Caze (Lexington Books), 151-80, 2022
Sartre Studies International 27(2), 87-100, 2021
There is an ambiguity in Jean-Paul Sartre's The Imaginary (1940). On the one hand, Sartre describ... more There is an ambiguity in Jean-Paul Sartre's The Imaginary (1940). On the one hand, Sartre describes mental images as impoverished in contrast to the fullness and depth of the world of perception. On the other hand, Sartre identifies the imagination with human freedom, and in this sense the imaginary can be seen as an enrichment of the real. This paper explores this ambiguity and its import for understanding both racist and antiracist ways of relating to others. Part One explores Sartre's argument for the "essential poverty" of the image through examples of racist images. Part Two discusses the enriching power of the imaginary for cultivating more just social and political arrangements in the context of racial oppression. Part Three argues that bad faith can take the form either of fleeing from reality into the impoverished world of the imaginary, or of failing to see the imaginary possibilities implicitly enriching the real.
Transforming Politics with Merleau-Ponty: Thinking Beyond the State, ed. Jérôme Melançon (Rowman & Littlefield), 87-106, 2021
Studia UBB.Philosophia 66(1), 67-98, 2021
Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 3(1), 1-26, 2020
Human Studies 43, 37-60, 2020
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature B.V... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature B.V.. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com". Vol.:(0123456789) Human Studies (2020) 43:37-60 https://doi.
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 57(1), 56-97, 2019
This paper draws on the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt in order to explo... more This paper draws on the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt in order to explore the nature of free action. Part one outlines three familiar ways in which we often understand the nature of freedom. Part two argues that these common understandings of freedom are rooted in impoverished conceptions of time and subjectivity. Part three engages with Arendt's conception of natality alongside Merleau-Ponty's conception of expression in order to argue that the freely acting self draws in improvisational manners on the resources of a shared past in order to open unprecedented spaces of meaning for the future, and in so doing at once discovers and institutes herself as the self that she is. Part four draws on an example of anti-oppressive political action in order to argue that free action not only has the power to inaugurate new spaces of shared meaning for the future, but also to change the sens of the shared past. By the same token, free action is vulnerable in its ontological status and ethical meanings to the events and judgments of the future. Part five argues with both Merleau-Ponty and Arendt that ethical-political actors can do no better than to cultivate a political virtù while facing up to the inherently transgressive dimensions of free action in a shared historical world.
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 32(4), 607-27, 2018
eastern michigan university abstract: Against empiricist and rationalist prejudices concerning th... more eastern michigan university abstract: Against empiricist and rationalist prejudices concerning the nature of issues related to "mental health," this article offers a phenomenological account of identity as developed in a meaningful system with the environment (Umwelt) or world (Welt). Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty and Dewey, I argue that behavioral and emotional health and illness must be understood in terms of the plasticity or rigidity, respectively, of the individual's responses in the face of new and threatening environmental demands. However, individual plasticity and rigidity are not given qualities of the individual but are themselves developed in healthy or unhealthy interpersonal environments. I discuss three cases of emotional and behavioral trouble in order to explore the manner in which unhealthy self-environment systems can undermine individuals' powers of adaptability and growth. keywords: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Dewey, being-in-the-world, health, plasticity
Perception and Its Development in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology, eds. Kirsten Jacobson and John Russon (University of Toronto Press), 308-37, 2017
Phenomenology and the Arts, eds. Carlson and Costello (Lexington Books), 193-218, 2016
Chiasmi International 16, 275-90, 2015
Journal of Speculative Philosophy 28(3), 358-69, 2014
Through an exploration of a home invasion scene in Ingmar Bergman's Shame, this article explores ... more Through an exploration of a home invasion scene in Ingmar Bergman's Shame, this article explores the ways in which it is not only our own bodies that are vulnerable to assault but also the meaningful objects through which we expressively engage with the world, as well as the worldly context of these embodied engagements. First, I draw primarily on the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to explore the ways in which things come to be incorporated into our bodily experience and how our vulnerability as embodied individuals is thus extended into the life of these things. Second, I engage with phenomenological accounts of home and psychoanalytic accounts of childhood development in order to argue that our extended bodily vulnerability is coextensive with our creative openness to the world. Finally, I offer some reflections on the role played by breakdown in phenomenological experience, at the level of the things through which we are "at home" to expressively extend ourselves out into the world and at the level of the sense of "homelessness" alive in the experience of anxiety. keywords: Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, embodiment relations, vulnerability, home embodiment relations, vulnerability, and breakdown
Encyclopedia Article by Laura McMahon
Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Philosophers, 2021
Book Reviews by Laura McMahon
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2020
Rajiv Kaushik, Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology, SUNY Press,... more Rajiv Kaushik, Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology, SUNY Press, 2019, 171pp., $32.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781438476766.
Continental Philosophy Review, 2019
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature B.V... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature B.V.. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
Environmental Philosophy, 2019
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CV by Laura McMahon
Public Philosophy by Laura McMahon
Papers by Laura McMahon
Encyclopedia Article by Laura McMahon
Book Reviews by Laura McMahon
Introduction: Jérôme Melançon: Situating Merleau-Ponty and Political Philosophy: Relations, Institutions, and Transformations
Chapter 1 Dorothea Olkowski : On the Limits of Perception for Social Interaction in Merleau-Ponty
Chapter 2 Emily S. Lee: The Possibility of Emotional Appropriateness for Groups Identified with a Temperament
Chapter 3 Martín Plot: Societies without Bodies and the Bodies of Society: Equality and Reversibility in Lefort and Butler’s Encounters with
Merleau-Ponty
Chapter 4 Paul Mazzocchi: Homo Utopicus: Merleau-Ponty and the Utopian Body
Chapter 5 Ann V. Murphy: Vulnerability as Revolt: Hunger Strikes, Temporality, and the Contestation of Social Death
Chapter 6 Laura McMahon: The “Great Phantom”: Merleau-Ponty on Habitus, Freedom, and Political Transformation
Chapter 7 Bryan Smyth: Freedom’s Ground: Merleau-Ponty and the Dialectics of Nature
Chapter 8 Ted Toadvine: Ecophenomenology after the End of Nature
Chapter 9 Dan Furukawa Marques: Political Phenomenology as Ethnographic Method
Chapter 10 Jérôme Melançon: Toward a New Balance and Interdependence: Merleau-Ponty on Colonialism and Underdevelopment
Chapter 11 Emmanuel de Saint Aubert: The Perceptual Foundation of Care