Institution in personal and public history. Introduction -- Institution and life -- Institution of a feeling -- The institution of a work of art -- Institution of a domain of knowledge -- The field of culture -- Historical institution: particularity and universality -- Summary for Thursday's course: Institution in personal and public history -- The problem of passivity: sleep, the unconscious, memory. The philosophy and the phenomenon of passivity -- For an ontology of the perceived world -- Sleep -- Perceptual (...) consciousness and imagining consciousness -- Symbolism -- Dreams -- The Freudian unconscious -- Delusions: gradiva -- The case of Dora -- The problem of memory -- Appendix: three notes on the Freudian unconscious -- Summary for Monday's course: the problem of passivity: sleep, the unconscious, memory. (shrink)
"Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own." In 1948, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote and delivered on French radio a series of seven lectures on the theme of perception. Translated here into English for the first time, they offer a lucid and concise insight into one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth-century. The lectures explore themes central not only to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy but to phenomenology as a whole. He begins by rejecting the idea - (...) inherited from Descartes and influential within science - that perception is unreliable, prone to distort the world around us. Merleau-Ponty instead argues that perception is inseparable from our senses and it is how we make sense of the world. Merleau-Ponty explores this guiding theme through a brilliant series of reflections on science, space, our relationships with others, animal life and art. Throughout, he argues that perception is never something learned and then applied to the world. As creatures with embodied minds, he reminds us that we are born perceiving and share with other animals and infants a state of constant, raw, unpredictable contact with the world. He provides vivid examples with the help of Kafka, animal behavior and above all modern art, particularly the work of Cezanne. A thought-provoking and crystalline exploration of consciousness and the senses, The World of Perception is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Merleau-Ponty, twentieth-century philosophy and art. (shrink)
Merleau-Ponty was a pivotal figure in twentieth century French philosophy. He was responsible for bringing the phenomenological methods of the German philosophers, Husserl and Heidegger, to France and instigated a new wave of interest in this approach. His influence extended well beyond the boundaries of philosophy and can be seen in theories of politics, art and language. This is the first volume to bring together a comprehensive selection of Merleau-Ponty's writing and presents a cross-section of his work which shows the (...) historical progression of his ideas and influence. (shrink)
Preface WE NEED A PHILOSOPHY of both history and spirit to deal with the problems we touch upon here. Yet we would be unduly rigorous if we were to wait for ...
INTRODUCTION HOW DIFFERENT — HOW DOWNRIGHT INCONGRUOUS — the philosophical essays and the ad hoc, primarily political observations which make up this volume ...
