Maurice Merleau-Ponty

1908-1961 · French · Phenomenology, Philosophy of Perception, Existentialism, Ontology

True philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world.

When Maurice Merleau-Ponty submitted his doctoral theses in 1945, he was taking aim at an error so deep it had gone unnoticed: Cartesian rationalism and behaviorist science both assumed a world of already-constituted objects and then tried to account for how we perceive them. Against this shared premise — what he called "objective thought" — he argued that perception is lived from inside, by a body already at home in its world before reflection begins.

Topics Maurice Merleau-Ponty addresses

• objective thought
• the phenomenal field
• the lived body
• the body schema
• motor intentionality
• operative intentionality
• flesh and chiasm
• reversibility
• wild being
• perceptual faith
• the return to phenomena
• the phenomenological reduction
• hyper-reflection
• sedimentation
• the depth of the visible
• expression
• situated freedom
• the perception of history
• the liquidation of the dialectic
• Molyneux's problem
• temporality
• the problem of other minds
• empathy and intersubjectivity
• the philosophy of painting

Converse with Maurice Merleau-Ponty on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.