Product Description

One of the most important thinkers of the post-war era, Maurice Merleau-Ponty presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception to French radio listeners in1948. Available in a paperback English translation for the first time in the Routledge Classics series to mark the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth, this is a dazzling and accessible guide to a whole universe of experience, from the pursuit of scientific knowledge, through the psychic life of animals to the glories of the art of Paul Cézanne.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #95126 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

From the Back Cover

‘Merleau-Ponty… speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science – and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger.’ - James Elkins

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the most important thinkers of the post-war era. Central to his thought was the idea that human understanding comes from our bodily experience of the world that we perceive: a deceptively simple argument, perhaps, but one that he felt had to be made in the wake of attacks from Descartes and contemporary science on the reliability of perception.

From this starting point, Merleau-Ponty presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception. Available in a paperback English translation for the first time in the Routledge Classics series to mark the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth, this is a dazzling and accessible guide to a whole universe of experience, from the pursuit of scientific knowledge to the art of Paul Cézanne.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). One of the century's leading phenomenologists and a founder, with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, of Les Temps Modernes. He is the author of The Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge Classics, 2002).

About the Author
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). One of the century's leading phenomenologists and a founder, with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, of the journal Les Temps Modernes. He is the author of The Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge Classics, 2002).

Customer Reviews

Fascinating and enjoyable
Seven little lectures (first given 1948 on French Radio) on modern philosophy and art and how they reevaluate the classic conceptions of what it is to perceive the world. More than just a run down of interesting research results on human perception, rather a modernist manifesto, which energetically rejects the stale world of the classics with it's hollow ideals of rationality and metaphysical grace and eternal completeness in favour of a full acknowledgement of the temporal finite, embodied, and sometimes irrational world of our senses. After all, we are not disembodied spirits but bodies and thus an integral part of the world we perceive.
Btw. modern in this context means modern in a proper modernist way, i.e. the one last genuinely used in the fifties and maybe early sixties of the last century, this makes it not only an inspiring read, and an interesting entry point into the world of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, but also a fascinating document of its time.