Abstract

The co-incidental publication of Merleau-Ponty’s uncompleted manuscript in English translation and of Gary Madison’s thesis is a happy accident. While Madison does not include this large fragment in his survey of the course of the philosopher’s development, he was able to give great attention to that other noble fragment, The Visible and the Invisible, so that his book could well serve as a long, clear and helpful introduction to the maturest thought of the great phenomenologist, as expressed in the work which lay unfinished at the moment of his death in 1961. Neither in the case of the thesis nor in that of the latest fragment to be revealed are there any horizon-opening surprises. The Prose of the World reveals the philosopher at the same stage of development as The Visible and the Invisible. And Madison has arrived at a view of the philosopher’s development which confirms some of the earlier analyses. But unfinished as the manuscript may be, it contains many pages of the highest calibre, analyses unexcelled for their power to evoke the ability of language to vehicle meaning and for communication to occur within the living fabric of the body’s incarnation in the world.