June 25, 2011, Greencastle, Ind. — William S. Hamrick, professor emeritus of philosophy at Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville and 1966 graduate of DePauw University, has published Nature and Logos: A Whiteheadian Key to Merleau-Ponty's Fundamental Thought. Co-authored by Jan Van Der Veken, professor emeritus of philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven, it's described by the State University of New York Press as "the first book-length account of how Maurice Merleau-Ponty used certain texts by Alfred North Whitehead to develop an ontology based on nature, and how he could have used other Whitehead texts that he did not know in order to complete his last ontology."
The synopsis continues, "This account is enriched by several of Merleau-Ponty's unpublished writings not previously available in English, by the first detailed treatment of certain works by F. W. J. Schelling in the course of showing how they exerted a substantial influence on 
both Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead, and by the first extensive discussion of Merleau-Ponty's interest in the Stoics's notion of the twofold logos -- the logos endiathetos and the logos proforikos. This book provides a thorough exploration of the consonance between these two philosophers in their mutual desire to overcome various bifurcations of nature, and of nature from spirit, that haunted philosophy and science since the seventeenth century."
Learn more, and order the book, at Amazon.com.
Dr. Hamrick previously authored An Existential Phenomenology of Law: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phaenomenologica) and Kindness and the Good Society: Connections of the Heart.