Buddhist philosophy of Anicca (impermanence), Dukkha (suffering), and

This book aims to guide its reader through the notorious difficulties of Merleau-Pony's famous "Phenomenology of Perception". The author contextualizes, reconstructs, clarifies and, where necessary, completes Merleau-Ponty's analyses chapter by chapter.

Selected essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty published from 1947 to 1961.

The past four decades have seen an increasing number of discussions by philosophers, environmentalists, scientists, politicians, and lay persons on the environmental damage done to the earth by human beings. Many of these thinkers and activists have demanded that human beings decide to share the earth with other natural species and not destroy them. Some have discussed human responsibility for the world, environmental ethics, and human stewardship of the earth, but have not ontologically clarified what they mean by these things. This book, based on analysis of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is one of the first attempts to ontologically clarify the idea of sharing the earth with other species. This text shows that many of the truths concerning perception that Merleau-Ponty brought forth from concealment have worthy implications for our relationship to other species of nature and to other beings that we encounter in the world. The work explains that Merleau-Ponty's findings and thoughts concerning perception can indicate how to live a whole and worthy life while sharing the world with other beings. The authors show new implications for human existence on the basis of some of the truths concerning perception that Merleau-Ponty disclosed.

Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception is an ideal starting point for anyone coming to Merleau-Ponty for the first time and reading his magnum opus. It is essential reading for students of Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology and related subjects such as art and cultural studies.

'In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principle themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science – and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger.' - James Elkins Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the most important thinkers of the post-war era. Central to his thought was the idea that human understanding comes from our bodily experience of the world that we perceive: a deceptively simple argument, perhaps, but one that he felt had to be made in the wake of attacks from contemporary science and the philosophy of Descartes on the reliability of human perception. From this starting point, Merleau-Ponty presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception to French radio listeners in 1948. Available in a paperback English translation for the first time in the Routledge Classics series to mark the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth, this is a dazzling and accessible guide to a whole universe of experience, from the pursuit of scientific knowledge, through the psychic life of animals to the glories of the art of Paul Cézanne.

With Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was the foremost French philosopher of the post-war period. What makes this work so important is that it returned the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato.

A clear and comprehensive introduction to the thought of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The work that Maurice Merleau-Ponty planned to call The Prose of the World, or Introduction to the Prose of the World, was unfinished at the time of his death. The book was to constitute the first section of a two-part work whose aim was to offer, as an extension of his Phenomenology of Perception, a theory of truth. This edition's editor, Claude Lefort, has interpreted and transcribed the surviving typescript, reproducing Merleau-Ponty's own notes and adding documentation and commentary.

Philosophers and artists consider the relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for understanding art and aesthetic experience. This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher’s writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining.