Ambiguity of Time, Self, and Philosophical Explanation in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Hume

Me In the PhenomejrcolpgY of Perception, Maurice rleau-Ponty criticizes ""the "prejudice toward the objective world" 1 which, he says, contaminates philosophy. Under the influence of this prejudice, philosophers have used "objective data"--data which does not come from perception but from other sources such as science--to study perception, instead of using the actual subjective data of perception. The result has been a history of inaccurate theories of perception and knowledge. One expression of Merleau-Ponty's critique of this prejudice is his thesis of the ambiguity of time, which he approaches through a discussion of the constitution of the body as an object. Although Merleau-Ponty does not explicitly say so, a close examination of this thesis reveals that object-oriented appraches to philosophy do not take into account the ambiguity of time.