M. C. Dillon (1938–2005) was widely regarded as a world-leading Merleau-Ponty scholar. His book Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (1988) is recognised as a classic text that revolutionised the philosophical conversation about the great French phenomenologist. Dillon followed that book with two others: Semiological Reductionism, a critique of early-1990s linguistic reductionism, and Beyond Romance a richly developed theory of love. At the time of his death, Dillon had nearly completed two further books to which he was passionately committed. The first one offers a highly original interpretation of Nietzsche’s ontology of becoming. The second offers a detailed ethical theory based on Merleau-Ponty’s account of carnal inter subjectivity. The Ontology of Becoming and the Ethics of Particularity collects these two manuscripts written by a distinguished philosopher at the peak of his powers—manuscripts that, taken together, offer a distinctive and powerful view of human life and ethical relations. /

Originally published by Indiana University Press in 1988, this is a revised second edition containing a new preface plus an additional chapter on ""Truth in Art"". Dillon's general thesis is that Merleau-Ponty has developed the first genuine alternative to ontological dualism seen in Western philosophy. From his early work on the philosophical significance of the human body to his later ontology of the flesh, Merleau-Ponty shows that the perennial problems growing out of dualistic conceptions of mind and body, subject and object, immanence and transcendence can be resolved within the framework of a new way of thinking based on the exemplar of the worldly embodiment of thought.