The work which this author planned to call The Prose of the World, or Introduction to the Prose of the World, is unfinished. There is good reason to believe that he deliberately abandoned it and that, he had lived, he would not have completed it, at least in the form that he first outlined. Once finished, the book was to constitute the first section of a two-part work--the second would have had a more distinct metaphysical nature--whose aim was to offer (...) us, as an extension of the Phenomenology of Perception, a theory of truth. (shrink)

The Sensible World and the World of Expression presents the lecture notes for a course taught by Maurice Marleau-Ponty, a central figure of phenomenological philosophy, at a key point in his career.

This article aims to establish an understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s view of creative expression, and of its phenomenological function, setting out from the intriguing statement in his essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” that the painter (or writer or philosopher) finds himself in the situation of the first human being trying to express herself. Although the importance of primary or creative expression in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is well known, there is no consensus among commentators with respect to how this notion is to (...) be understood, and of its apparently paradoxical relation to experience in his philosophy. On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty seems to presuppose that there is an original meaning pre-given in experience; on the other hand, expression is described as a hazardous enterprise, because the meaning to be expressed does not exist before expression has succeeded. In order to resolve this tension, I explore the significance of the precariousness of creative expression, arguing that it must be related to its other side: the constituted, all too often petrified meaning that we must start out from. (shrink)

First published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s monumental _Phénoménologie de la perception _signalled the arrival of a major new philosophical and intellectual voice in post-war Europe. Breaking with the prevailing picture of existentialism and phenomenology at the time, it has become one of the landmark works of twentieth-century thought. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers. _Phenomenology of Perception _stands in the great phenomenological tradition (...) of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is decisive, as he brings this tradition and other philosophical predecessors, particularly Descartes and Kant, to confront a neglected dimension of our experience: the lived body and the phenomenal world. Charting a bold course between the reductionism of science on the one hand and "intellectualism" on the other, Merleau-Ponty argues that we should regard the body not as a mere biological or physical unit, but as the body which structures one’s situation and experience within the world. Merleau-Ponty enriches his classic work with engaging studies of famous cases in the history of psychology and neurology as well as phenomena that continue to draw our attention, such as phantom limb syndrome, synaesthesia, and hallucination. This new translation includes many helpful features such as the reintroduction of Merleau-Ponty’s discursive Table of Contents as subtitles into the body of the text, a comprehensive Translator’s Introduction to its main themes, essential notes explaining key terms of translation, an extensive Index, and an important updating of Merleau-Ponty’s references to now available English translations. Also included is a new foreword by Taylor Carman and an introduction to Merleau-Ponty_ _by Claude Lefort. Translated by Donald A. Landes. (shrink)

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, _Phenomenology of Perception_ is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others.

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, _Phenomenology of Perception_ is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the _body_ to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others. Perhaps above (...) all, Merleau-Ponty's insights about the embodied mind are a bold and refreshing challenge to the new era of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, as scientists and psychologists discover the centrality of the body to mind and intelligence. (shrink)

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, _Phenomenology of Perception_ is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others.

At the time of his death in May 1961, Maurice Merleau-Ponty held the chair of Philosophy at the College de France. Together with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he was cofounder of the successful and influential review Les Temps Modernes. However, after Merleau-Ponty's two studies of Marxist theory and practice (Humanisme et Terreur and Les Aventures de la Dialectique), he alienated both orthodox Marxists and "mandarins of the left" such as Sartre and de Beauvoir. Perhaps his most (...) lasting contribution to the interpretation of human existence was his formulation of a positive philosophical approach to psychology the foundations of which were clearly outlined in The Structure of Behavior and later more fully developed in Phenomenology of Perception. (shrink)

What makes this work so important is that it returned the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato.

This book consists of Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.

INTRODUCTION HOW DIFFERENT — HOW DOWNRIGHT INCONGRUOUS — the philosophical essays and the ad hoc, primarily political observations which make up this volume ...

Original writings by Merleau-Ponty available only in this volume, including interviews, dialogues, and important texts, reflecting the variety of his thoughts from 1933 to 1960. This second edition includes an expanded bibliography by and on Merleau-Ponty.

Written between 1945 and 1947, the essays in Sense and Non-Sense provide an excellent introduction to Merleau-Ponty's thought.

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)

Resume. of. the. Course: Husserl. at. the. Limits. of. Phenomenology. Translated by John O'Neill and revised by Leonard Lawlor Since we still lack a complete edition of Husserl's Nachlass, the following discussion can hardly pretend to be ...

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)

Continuing the posthumous editions of the manuscripts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty started in 1964, we publish the preparation notes for the courses of the College of France of 1959 and 1961. Each of these courses questions in a different way the philosophical exercise. How is philosophy possible today after the phenomenological enterprise? In the course of 1959, Merleau-Ponty presented a study by Husserl and Heidegger. It shows the contributions but also the limits. In addition, he has recourse to (...) the interpretation of the philosophy developed by Hegel and Marx, and his gesture is also given as a work of self-interpretation. The reading he suggests of Descartes makes the different levels of his approach sensitive. It seemed interesting to us to associate with his course notes the first writing of the chapter “Interrogation and intuition” of the Visible and the invisible which is in great affinity with the problems approached in these courses. This draft of the Visible and the Invisible, abandoned by Merleau-Ponty, makes it possible to mark the difference in style from the preparation notes which, as Claude Lefort writes, “do not exactly constitute a writing”. Rather, they offer food for thought to continue to question the philosopher's thinking. (shrink)

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, Phenomenology of Perception is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others. Perhaps above (...) all, Merleau-Ponty's insights about the embodied mind are a bold and refreshing challenge to the new era of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, as scientists and psychologists discover the centrality of the body to mind and intelligence. (shrink)

This volume contains the first English translation of Merleau-Ponty's lecture course, The Experience of Others, and his important preface, Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis. It also includes first translations of articles by nine other Merleau-Ponty scholars.

Perception and expression are compared and contrasted as constituent parts of a semiotic system. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological method of 1) description, 2) reduction, And 3) intentionality is analyzed as a synergic function for perception and expression. Perception is understood as the interplay of immanent and transcendent signs which signify a phenomenal presence. Expression is examined as the synthesis of "le langage," "la langue," and "la parole." then, Expression is viewed in its two modalities as 1) existential and 2) (...) empirical speech. Finally, Merleau-Ponty's theory of communication or theory of intercorporeal being is drawn from the semiotic common ground of his theories of perception and expression. Hence, A single theory of signs is advanced to explain the synergism of intrapersonal and interpersonal being. (shrink)

This article studies a link between perception and politics by seeking, in Merleau-Ponty’s work, something like a “mirror relation” in the domains of encounters of love and politics. While in Phenomenology of Perception the analysis of sexuality seemingly renders love impossible, in the courses on Institution, Merleau-Ponty affirms the possibility of love by characterizing it as an institution, a sensible idea, a “mirror relation”. When the lover demands signs of love from the loved one, he demands to see (...) in the eyes, the voice, and the experience of the other his own reflection, the reflection of his experience, his words, his gestures, and the demand of love that he is formulating. The promise of love is thus an institution of sense which sheds a new light on all actions past and future, it is a way of overcoming contingency. Conceiving of politics as a “mirror relation” thus means adopting a careful philosophy that observes the event like a mirror and gives place to sensible ideas, at the intersection of gazes understood as a “type of reflection”. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to the hermeneutical theory of expressive meaning that has been developed on the basis of an ongoing dialogue with traditional phenomenology. The early portion of the paper examines the unstable boundaries between expression and indication as a key to a new approach to expressive meaning. The paper then takes up Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of expressive life as it emerges in ‘Phenomenology of Perception,’ his first attempt to discuss perception, aesthetics, and temporality (...) in comprehensive terms. The third part of the paper examines Merleau-Ponty’s return to the paintings of Paul Cezanne, which not only clarifies his earlier position but also deepens the philosophical meaning of his reflections on language. My final comments are concerned with how phenomenology can be broadened in a way that can become responsive to the hermeneutical theory of expressive meaning. (shrink)

The essay attempts to delineate how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception can be applied to theories of sign processes, and how it reworks the framework of the phenomenalist conception of communication. His later philosophy involved a reformulation of subjectivity and a resolution of the subject/object dualism. My claim is that this non-reductionist theory of perception reveals a different view of nature as we experience it in an expressive and meaningful interaction. The perspective that another living being has and communicates (...) entails a form of depth, the invisible dimension of the visible or audible. These two aspects of perception and dialogue are intertwined in a dialectic of presence and absence, so that sense arises in the perceptual field rather than in subjectivity. This, I argue, is the most fundamental result of his theory. The origination of meaning in the workings of the chiasm of visible and invisible in perception opens up an objective sense of intersubjective nature. The essay also deals with the role of the phenomenological reduction; a suspension of beliefs and existence claims in experience. The reduction enables us to take a step back and look more closely at our understanding of nature in light of the historical and cultural influence on our thinking. (shrink)

Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. Presupposed in this statement of the problematic, however, is that there is an original discontinuity, a rupture between phenomenology and the natural sciences that must be remedied. I propose that this way of thinking about the issue is rooted in a simplistic understanding of the phenomenological reduction that entails certain assumptions about (...) the subject matter of phenomenology and its relationship to the natural sciences. By contrast, Merleau‐Ponty's first work, The Structure of Behavior, presents a radically different approach to the phenomenological reduction, one that traverses the natural sciences and integrates them into phenomenology from the outset. I outline the argument for this position in The Structure of Behavior and then discuss consequences for current methodological issues surrounding the naturalization of phenomenology, focusing on the relationship between empirical sciences of mind, phenomenological psychology, and transcendental phenomenology. This novel exegesis of Merleau‐Ponty's view on the reduction offers new insight into his oft‐quoted remark that the phenomenological reduction is impossible to complete. (shrink)

This thesis aims to clarify the intrinsic characteristics of ‘image’ of everything for the image in the society of the fourth industrial revolution by the phenomenological dimention based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and to clarify the value of image, the intrinsic characteristics of ‘painting-image’, ‘photo-image’ and ‘film-image’. It will reveal that ‘thing-image’, ‘artifact-image’, ‘digital image’, ‘robot-image’ become the images for society of humanities by these clarifications. The image of everything is ‘appearance-image’ to reveal itself, ‘expression-image’ from the phenomenological, (...) ontic point of view, and ‘image-being’ as ‘being as image and being image’ from the phenomenological, ontological point of view. The augmented reality-image is the image of fusion of virtual image+real image+body-subject image. Things-images in the world of Internet of Things(IoT) become things-images of digital communication. Painting-image, photo-image, film-image are text-images. The painting to paint a correspondence of perceptive phenomena and natural affairs themselves means the painting of the image to fuse the diverse images on horizon-image of natural affairs themselves by the multilateral, intentional vision. The sense of the intentional photo-image, the meaning of being of body-subject, and the facticity and singularity of object itself of photo shoot reveal the intrinsic characteristics of photo-image. The film-images in film manifest the intrinsic characteristics of the connective flesh between them mutually. Finally, it is necessary that the value of the intrinsic characteristics of image in the society of the fourth industrial revolution becomes the value for the righteous personality. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of (...) speaking over spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty acknowledges several levels of ‘expression’ running from the most basic forms of sensation to painting, poetry and philosophy. This essay concentrates on his notion of ‘diacritical perception’ as key to this expressive continuum. It shows how Merleau-Ponty makes the radical move of bringing together phenomenological description with structural linguistics to reveal how perception is fundamentally structured like language. It also suggests that this move is part of his overall pursuit of an ‘indirect ontology’. Expression operates by (...) an ‘indirect method’ of gaps, elisions, folds, latencies, absences, hollows, silences, lacunas – or what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘negativities that are not nothing’: nothing but the non-being which reveals being. The radical implications of ‘diacritical perception’ are powerfully explored in Merleau-Ponty’s Collège de France seminar Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression and in his late essay ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’. To perceive diacritically is to read and write the flesh. (shrink)

_reduction in favour of his existentialist account of être au monde. I show that whilst Merleau-Ponty _ _rejected, what he saw as, the transcendental idealist context in which Husserl presents the _ _reduction, he nevertheless accepts the heart of it, the epoché, as a methodological principle. _ _Contrary to a number of Merleau-Ponty scholars, être au monde is perfectly compatible with the _ _epoché and Merleau-Ponty endorses both. I also argue that it is a mistake to think (...) that Merleau-_ _Ponty’s liberal use of the results of empirical psychology signify a rejection of the epoché. A proper _ _understanding of his views on the relation between phenomenology and psychology shows that, at _ _least in Merleau-Ponty’s eyes, the methods of phenomenology and the empirical sciences are _ _largely similar. I conclude that we have every reason to think that Merleau-Ponty accepted _ _Husserl’s demand that the phenomenologist place the world in brackets._. (shrink)

This paper engages with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of the sexed body in the Phenomenology of Perception. I focus on his notion of the sexual schema to show that, contrary to a number of feminist critiques, it does not posit a neutral body overcoded by culturally-contingent sexual determinations or erase the feminine body, but is informed by Merleau-Ponty particular version of the phenomenological reduction whereby factic determinations are “bracketed” to permit the object under study to reveal itself (...) as it is rather than as we wish it to be or have been conditioned to think it. I subsequently defend Merleau-Ponty against the long-standing claim that entwining sexuality with existence prevents an analytic and by extension positive conception of sexuality by arguing that he rejects the monadic logic that this charge is premised on to instead challenge us to think of sexuality in terms of its integration with an individual’s entire embodied, embedded existence. The result is an analysis that emphasizes the ambiguity, afoundationalism, individuality, and open-ended immanent expressivity of sexuality. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty acknowledges several levels of ‘expression’ running from the most basic forms of sensation to painting, poetry and philosophy. This essay concentrates on his notion of ‘diacritical perception’ as key to this expressive continuum. It shows how Merleau-Ponty makes the radical move of bringing together phenomenological description with structural linguistics to reveal how perception is fundamentally structured like language. It also suggests that this move is part of his overall pursuit of an ‘indirect ontology’. Expression operates by (...) an ‘indirect method’ of gaps, elisions, folds, latencies, absences, hollows, silences, lacunas – or what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘negativities that are not nothing’: nothing but the non-being which reveals being. The radical implications of ‘diacritical perception’ are powerfully explored in Merleau-Ponty’s Collège de France seminar Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression and in his late essay ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’. To perceive diacritically is to read and write the flesh. (shrink)