Maurice Merleau-Ponty
| Maurice Merleau-Ponty | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 14 March 1908 Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime, France |
| Died | 3 May 1961 (aged 53) Paris, France |
| Alma mater |
École Normale Supérieure University of Paris |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School |
Phenomenology Existential phenomenology Embodied phenomenology Western Marxism Structuralism Post-structuralism |
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Main interests
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Psychology, embodiment, metaphysics, perception, Gestalt theory, epistemology, philosophy of art, Western Marxism |
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Notable ideas
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Phenomenology of perception, anonymous collectivity, motor intentionality, the flesh of the world, "the perceiving mind is an incarnated mind," chiasm (chiasme), distinction between words as gestures having sedimented meaning and spoken words as gestures having existential meaning,invagination |
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (French: [mɔʁis mɛʁlo pɔ̃ti]; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, 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, and politics. He was on the editorial board of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine established by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945.
At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. Like the other major phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty expressed his philosophical insights in writings on art, literature, linguistics, and politics. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences and especially with descriptive psychology. It is through this engagement that his writings have become influential in the recent project of naturalizing phenomenology, in which phenomenologists use the results of psychology and cognitive science.
Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and maintained that the body and that which it perceived could not be disentangled from each other. The articulation of the primacy of embodiment led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call “indirect ontology” or the ontology of “the flesh of the world” (la chair du monde), seen in his final and incomplete work, The Visible and Invisible, and his last published essay, “Eye and Mind”.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908 in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime, France. His father died in 1913 when Merleau-Ponty was five years old. After secondary schooling at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, and Jean Hyppolite. He attended Edmund Husserl's "Paris Lectures" in February 1929. In 1929, Merleau-Ponty received his DES degree (diplôme d'études supérieures, roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) from the University of Paris, on the basis of the (now-lost) thesis "La Notion de multiple intelligible chez Plotin" ("Plotinus's Notion of the Intelligible Many"), directed by Émile Bréhier. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930.
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