Samantha Matherne has argued that the aesthetic concept of style offers a solution to the problems of perceptual presence and constancy while sidestepping the problem of the unity of perception. On Matherne’s view, drawn from Merleau-Ponty, we “perceive the absent features of objects as present…because we recognize that the objects we perceive have a unique style that persists through and unifies their appearances.” While her account successfully describes the stylistic component of object perception, it inadequately accounts for how styles are made available to perceivers. Key to answering this question is recognizing that the unity of persons can also be understood in terms of style. To make this position clear, I explore an aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy largely overlooked by Matherne, the relationship between style and time. Styles are patterns of coherency through time manifested via developmental difference. Styles are permeable in that they natively allow for the integration of aspects of other styles, and persons themselves are composed of styles. Consequently, the problem perceptual presence is a species of the problem of how stylistic elements of perception are absorbed into the stylistic features of human persons.

The two most influential accounts of pleasure in the Anglophone tradition of ethics are the "Hedonic Tone" Account and the "Attitudinal" (i.e., motivational or preferential) Account. In what follows, I will argue that Hedonic Tone Accounts of pleasure are inconsistent with hedonisti c accounts of well being because the only reasonable Hedonic Tone Account requires multiple non comparable hedonic tones. Insofar as at least some individual pleasures are non comparable, pleasure, at least by itself, cannot serve as a covering value by which to evaluate well being.

Most phenomenological accounts of time insist that “time…is a milieu to which one can only gain access and that can only be understood by occupying a situation within it” (Merleau-Ponty, 1947: 347). Time presupposes a perspective, or a “view on time” (Merleau-Ponty, 1947: 433). This understanding of time sharply contrasts the more abstract notions of time employed by contemporary physics and metaphysics. In this paper, I begin to reconcile these views by investigating what Richard Muller calls the “now problem” of relativistic physics. I suggest that a promising path forward is to understand subjective temporality as what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the perspectival “wave of duration.” To have temporal perspective is to be on the boundary of what Muller calls the “shock front” of nothing, or the “leading edge of time” as it and space expand (Muller, 2016: 293).