Maurice Merleau Ponty

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Maurice Merleau Ponty, [1]

Maurice Merleau Ponty (1908-1961) is a philosopher who could be associated with existentialism, but he is not as radical as, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre, in thinking about radical freedom and responsibility, which are important concepts in existentialism. Maurice Merleau Ponty and an-Paul Sartre were friends and co-founders editors of Les Temps. However he began having a disagreement with Sartre about his politics, which led to the publishment of the Adventures of the Dialectic in 1955. In the Adventures of the Dialectic, Ponty analysed Sastre's relationship with communism and criticizing his subject-object relations in his version of phenomenology (The European Graduate School, n.d.).

Edmund Husserl, was a great inspiration of Maurice Merleau Ponty and he attempted to invalidate tendencies in Western philosophy of empiricism and idealism and tried to emphasize human experience (The European Graduate School, n.d.). So did he embrace the fact that science and empirical data wre the path to the truth but rejected that science could discover philosofical truhts (Wyatt, 2010).

In 1945 he published his Phenomenology of Perception which was his defening work. In his work the Phenomenology of Perception he introduces the concept of the body-subject as an alternative to the Cartesian cogito. This is not the same as the traditional mind-body concept. This distinction is important because Ponty perceives the essences of the world existentially. There is a tension between bodily existence and the self as a subject of contemplation (Wyatt, 2010) . The two cannot be seen seperated from eachother but they are not the same. "You must exist physically before you can think about what it means to exist" (Wyatt, 2010).

Works of Maurice Merleau Ponty

• La Structure du comportement, Essay: 1942, 1949, rev. 6th ed. 1967 trans. The Structure of Behavior, 1963

• Les Relations avec autrui chez l’enfant, Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1958

• La Phenomenologie de la perception, Essay: 1945, 1976 trans. The Phenomenology of Perception, 1962

• Humanisme et terreur: Essai sur le probleme communiste, Essay: 1947 trans. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, 1969

• Sens et non-sens, Essays, Articles: 1948, 1966 trans. Sense and Non-Sense, 1964

• Eloge de la philosophie: Lecon inaugural faite au College de France, le jeudi 15 janvier 1953, 1953 trans. of original In Praise of Philosophy, 1963 revised as Les Aventures de la dialectique, 1955 trans. Adventures of the Dialectic, 1973

• Signes, Essays, Articles: 1960 trans. Signs, 1964

• Le Visible et l’ invisible, 1964, trans. The Visible and the Invisible, 1968.

• Resumes de cours, Lectures: 1952—1960 trans. Themes From the Lectures at the College de France, 1970

• Perception, Structure, Language, Essays: 1981

• Le Visible et l’ invisible, 1964,

• Resumes de cours, Lectures: 1952—1960

• Perception, Structure, Language, Essays: 1981

References

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2005). Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Found 8 september 2011, at http://www.iep.utm.edu/merleau/

The European Graduate School. (n.d.). Maurice Merleau-Ponty - Biography. Found 8 september 2011, at http://www.egs.edu/library/maurice-merleau-ponty/biography/

Wyatt, C.S. (2010). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, reconnecting education and philosophy. Found 8 september 2011, at http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/merleau.shtml

Contributors

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