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.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was the most distinctive French phenomenologist of the postwar generation and one of the most original twentieth-century philosophers of perception, embodiment, and the relation between consciousness and the world. Born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure with Sartre and Beauvoir, taught at the University of Lyon and the Sorbonne, and from 1952 held the chair in philosophy at the Collège de France.

Merleau-Ponty's first major work, The Structure of Behavior (1942), drew on Gestalt psychology and biology to argue against both behaviorist and Cartesian accounts of mind. Phenomenology of Perception (1945), his masterpiece, develops a phenomenology of embodied experience that rejects the Sartrean dualism of for-itself and in-itself in favor of the lived body as a third term: the body is neither a transparent consciousness nor an opaque thing but the situated agent through which a meaningful world is disclosed.

Merleau-Ponty's later work — Sense and Non-Sense (1948), Signs (1960), and the unfinished The Visible and the Invisible (published posthumously in 1964) — developed the phenomenology of embodiment into an ontology of the flesh as the elemental medium in which perceiver and perceived participate. His break with Sartre in 1953 over the Korean War and Sartre's commitment to communism reflected long-running philosophical differences. He died suddenly in 1961 at fifty-three.