Archeology of logos: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on the historicity of rationality

The thesis aims to examine the Ancient Greek heritage and its echoes in the works of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I undertake this inquiry by focusing on the issue raised by Husserl in his later writings, of the historicity of rationality, and by tracing the legacy of core concepts, such as logos, physis, arche and telos. The first part critically reconstructs the arguments behind Husserl’s teleological characterisation of European humanity. The second part studies the development of a post-Husserlian project in the work of Merleau-Ponty. I focus especially on his account of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, and the related sections in Eye and Mind, and The Visible and The Invisible. I try to defend the suggestion that key features of Merleau-Ponty’s post-Husserlian project come into sharper relief if they are read within a framework that relates his thinking to Pre-Socratic themes, notably through his novel use of some of the key concepts mentioned above.