Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908 – 1961
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a 20th-century French phenomenologist and one of the most original philosophers of the post-war French tradition. His 1945 work Phenomenology of Perception developed an account of the lived body as the primary site of experience, against both empiricist and intellectualist accounts of perception. He held chairs at the Sorbonne and the College de France, and was for many years closely associated with Sartre and de Beauvoir as co-editor of Les Temps Modernes. His later work, including The Visible and the Invisible, left unfinished at his sudden death in 1961, developed an ontology of the flesh that has been increasingly influential in contemporary philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and ecology. His thought stands at the centre of phenomenology's continuing influence on continental philosophy.
Key facts
- Nationality
- French
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Phenomenology, Continental, Existentialism
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning.”
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“The body is the vehicle of being in the world.”
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or rather there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“The world is not what I think, but what I live through.”
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out.”