Texts and Dialogues

by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Original writings by Merleau-Ponty available only in this volume, including interviews, dialogues, and important texts, reflecting the variety of his thoughts from 1933 to 1960. This second edition includes an expanded bibliography by and on Merleau-Ponty.

Genres: Philosophy

239 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. Like the other major phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty expressed his philosophical insights in writings on art, literature, and politics; however Merleau-Ponty was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the Twentieth Century to engage extensively with the sciences, and especially with descriptive psychology. Because of this engagement, his writings have become influential with the recent project of naturalizing phenomenology in which phenomenologists utilize the results of psychology and cognitive science.

Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime. His father was killed in World War 1 when Merleau-Ponty was 3. After secondary schooling at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930.

Merleau-Ponty first taught at Chartres, then became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945).

After teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a Chair.

Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for Les Temps Modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952.

Aged 53, he died suddenly of a stroke in 1961, apparently while preparing for a class on Descartes. He was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Reviews

[0 · Rating 3 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of ephemeral essays, notes, interviews, and transcriptions of roundtable conference discussions spanning the course of Merleau-Ponty's writing, including:

-his 1933 grant proposal to France's national science foundation to conduct a philosophical study of perception

-three early book reviews--of Scheler's Ressentiment, Marcel's Being and Having, and Sartre's Imagination--published in the Christian socialist journal Esprit in 1935 and 1936

-a 1946 review of Sartre's The Flies

-selections from Merleau-Ponty's 1954-55 weekly editorial column in the leftist paper L'Express

-Merleau-Ponty's remarks to Jaspers and Lukacs on Marxism at a 1946 conference

-A contentious debate between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre at a 1956 conference that aimed to establish a dialogue between Soviet and non-Soviet philosopers

-A 1960 roundtable discussion, chaired by Father Van Breda, between Quine, Ryle, Ayer, and Merleau-Ponty on the possibility of a dialogue between Anglo-American analytic philosophers of mind and phenomenologists

-A 1960 interview with Madeliene Chapsal on the role of philosophers in public discourse

-some unpublished 1960 working notes to the Visible and the Invisible on Claude Simon

-an essay by Father Van Breda on Merleau-Ponty's relationship with the Husserl Archives at Louvain, including all of the correspondences he sent to Van Breda, and including details of Merleau-Ponty's failed attempt, with Tran Duc Thao, to establish a Husserl collection at the Sorbonne

-some of Xavier Tilliette's notes from Merleau-Ponty's 1959 course on Nature

By no means essential reading, but still of interest to readers already familiar with his life and works

[Kamakana · Rating 3 out of 5]

if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

010611: collection of essays more on m-p working methods, rather than work. appendices were interesting: how m-p worked, how husserl archive made, lectures on husserl nature.