BOOK REVIEW Thinking Merleau-Ponty Forward / Review of Louise Westling (2014). The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language New York: Fordham University Press W. John Coletta Received: 7 February 2014 / Accepted: 2 October 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 A central thesis of Louise Westling’s highly accomplished and provocative The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language is that “human language and aesthetic behaviors emerge from our animality” (p. 93). What is perhaps most compelling about her thesis is that she supports it by exploring how an evolutionary continuity between an always already languaged world and human being-in-the-world can be understood without having to employ the dangerous (il) logic of social Darwinism or some schools of evolutionary psychology and without having to serve as yet another iteration of a naïve “metaphysics of presence”. Indeed, Derrida’s “fear of continuism” (and a whole generation of literary critics’ attendant and concomitant fear of same) is based in fact on a “false dilemma” (p. 72). As Westling writes, citing Matthew Calarco (2008) and Mary Midgley (1983), “(to say that everything is com- posed of atoms and molecules is to assert material continuism, but no one would then claim that all beings and objects and forces are therefore indistinguishable. Similarly, human kinship with other animals is not identity” (p. 72). Indeed, Westling succeeds in reading Merleau-Ponty in a way that opens up for further inquiry a postmodern evolutionary ecology, one that undermines biological essentialism and foundationalism (and a philosophical metaphysical presencing) and thus takes the “fear” out of Derrida’s notion of “continuism”. At the same time, Westling develops a vision of human being- in-the-world that, as she outlines with her chapter titles, provides us with “A Philosophy of Life” that stresses our “Animal Kin (ship)” and our joint participation with a world in which “Language Is Everywhere”. With Merleau-Ponty we may call this philosophy of life a “chiasmic ontology”, although Westling’s reading of Merleau- Ponty succeeds for me in extending the philosophical depth and breadth of his concept. This is a significant achievement: a convincing argument for a non-essentialist evolutionary ecology, for continuity without identity (or identity politics), for what I have called, following an argument made by Douglas Hofstadter (2008), the principle Biosemiotics DOI 10.1007/s12304-014-9220-1 W. J. Coletta (*) University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Stevens Point, WI, USA e-mail: jcoletta@uwsp.edu