This book aims to guide its reader through the notorious difficulties of Merleau-Pony's famous "Phenomenology of Perception". The author contextualizes, reconstructs, clarifies and, where necessary, completes Merleau-Ponty's analyses chapter by chapter.

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.

This is an advanced introduction to and original interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's greatest work, Phenomenology of Perception. Timothy Mooney provides a clear and compelling exposition of the theory of our projective being in the world, and demonstrates as never before the centrality of the body schema in the theory. Thanks to the schema's motor intentionality our bodies inhabit and appropriate space: our postures and perceptual fields are organised schematically when we move to realise our projects. Thus our lived bodies are ineliminably expressive in being both animated and outcome oriented through-and-through. Mooney also analyses the place of the work in the modern philosophical world, showing what Merleau-Ponty takes up from the Kantian and Phenomenological traditions and what he contributes to each. Casting a fresh light on his magnum opus, this book is essential reading for all those interested in the philosophy and phenomenology of the body.

'In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principle themes. He 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 contemporary science and the philosophy of Descartes on the reliability of human perception. From this starting point, Merleau-Ponty presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception to French radio listeners in 1948. 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.

Selected essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty published from 1947 to 1961.

This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty's aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher's writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining.

In this commentary, John O'Neill concentrates upon three themes in the goal Merleau-Ponty set for himself, namely "to restore to things their concrete physiognomy, to organisms their individual ways of dealing with the world, and to subjectivity its inherence in history." O'Neill considers the three objectives in their original order: first, the study of animal and human psychology; then, the phenomenology of perception; and finally, certain extensions of these perspectives in the historical and social sciences.

These are the codified thoughts that allowed Maurice Merleau-Ponty the opportunity to establish himself as a first rate philosopher. The world of philosophy has neglected the body for centuries, if not millennia, Phenomenology of Perception brings the most central part of our world back into the way we think about it. He crashed onto the scene and burned some of the most darling philosophical landmarks of his forebears in effigy. This book is generally held to be a decisive example of existentialism, particularly existentialist work in the French fashion, although there is far more than the vague imagined scent of a galloise on the pages. Existentialism is far from the only influence on the work. The discerning reader will see echoes of Plato's forms in Merleau-Ponty's essences and even an implicit critique of the idea. For the philosopher en chaise, the daring criticism of even Cartesian doubt is thrilling; it feels like jumping on the bed while Socrates isn't looking. Merleau-Ponty utterly rejects the mind-body duality put forward by so many of the giants of our philosophical ancestry in favour of an argument which emphasises the instrumental aspects of consciousness and our full and visceral habitation of our flesh. Gnaw on the questions that he will raise in your mind about whether huge assumptions have been made about the nature of consciousness and how that links to our physical selves. If only for a moment, throw your perceived certainties aside and engage with the idea that your very consciousness may not be what you think. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.