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.

CONTENTS:

foreword by stephanie menase -- Introduction by Thomas Baldwin -- The World of Perception and the World of Science -- Exploring the World of Perception: Space -- Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects -- Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life -- Man Seen from the Outside -- Art and the World of Perception -- Classical World, Modern World -- notes -- index

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).