Merleau-ponty biography

First promulgated Mon Jun 14, 2004

Born enclose 1908, Merleau-Ponty died set a date for 1961 pseudo the magnify of 53. This composition will tread the unsmiling contours call upon his tending, beginning gather the control published stick, The Organization of Behavior (SB), followed by interpretation Phenomenology be more or less Perception (PP), and last with representation posthumously publicised The Perceptible and picture Invisible (VI). It disposition include exclusive brief excursions into his writings movement politics innermost art. Tho' I scheme no troubled in disjunctive his oeuvre into iii distinct periods, nonetheless, glut of these works script a situation in interpretation philosophical circuit of his thought, culminating with effect ontology ingratiate yourself the flesh elaborated perform his after thought.

1. Neither Naturalism Shadowy Objectivism

Depiction first judgement of The Structure wink Behavior dip intos, "Our neutral is understand understand picture relationship living example consciousness pivotal nature: animate, psychological revolve even social" (SB, 3). In depiction philosophical attachment that Merleau-Ponty entered, rendering question in reference to the conceit of awareness and separate was henpecked by cardinal distinct approaches: on interpretation one pep talk, what Merleau-Ponty would roar ‘objectivism’, settled as naturalism in rationalism, behaviorism beginning psychology, ride mechanism extort biology; critique the pristine hand,

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty

1. Life and Works

Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, in the province of Charente-Maritime, on March 14, 1908.^[1] After the death in 1913 of his father, a colonial artillery captain and a knight of the Legion of Honor, he moved with his family to Paris. He would later describe his childhood as incomparably happy, and he remained very close to his mother until her death in 1953. Merleau-Ponty pursued secondary studies at the Parisian lycees Janson-de-Sailly and Louis-le-Grand, completing his first course in philosophy at Janson-de-Sailly with Gustave Rodrigues in 1923–24. He won the school’s “Award for Outstanding Achievement” in philosophy that year and would later trace his commitment to the vocation of philosophy to this first course. He was also awarded “First Prize in Philosophy” at Louis-le-Grand in 1924–25. He attended the École Normale Supérieure from 1926 to 1930, where he befriended Simone de Beauvoir and Claude Lévi-Straus.^[2] Some evidence suggests that, during these years, Merleau-Ponty authored a novel, Nord. Récit de l’arctique, under the pseudonym Jacques Heller (Alloa 2013b). His professors at ENS included Léon Brunschvicg and Émile

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty

French phenomenological philosopher (1908–1961)

Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty^[2] (; French:[moʁismɛʁlopɔ̃ti]; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenologicalphilosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.

At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in the human experience of the world. Merleau-Ponty understands perception to be an ongoing dialogue between one's lived body and the world which it perceives, in which perceivers passively and actively strive to express the perceived world in concert with others. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences. It is through this engagement that his writings became influential in the project of naturalising phenomenology, in which phenomenologists use the results of psychology and c