Book Description
More than sixty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir identified theimportance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writings to feminist theory. Hisexploration of the relationship between the body and the space it inhabitsis key to modern phenomenological thinking. But there has been littleagreement on how Merleau-Ponty's ideas ultimately have an impact onfeminist philosophy. Does his emphasis on physical subjectivity lend acertain agency to all bodies, regardless of sex? Or do Merleau-Ponty'sspecific descriptions of physical experience betray an intrinsic biastoward a male heterosexual point of view? The essays presented here byOlkowski and Weiss attempt to situate Merleau-Ponty in the larger contextof feminist theory, while impartially evaluating his contributions, bothpositive and negative, to that theory. ... Read more

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Chapter Titles (I - V)
(I) Existential Communication as Phenomenology: (1) ExistentialCommunication; (2) The Apparent Antinomy of Existential Communication; (3)Communication as Existentialism; (4) Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy asExistential Communication; (II) Existential Phenomenology as Semiology: (1)The Cartesian Dualism: Semiotic Phenomenalism (Peirce, Morris, Ogden andRichards, Russell); (2) Dualistic Synthesis: Semiotic Existentialism(Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre); (3) Semiotic as Existential Phenomenology(Barthes, Merleau-Ponty); (III) Perception:The Lived Body Experience: (1)The Primacy of Perception (Description); (2) Radical Reflection as Gestalt[Reduction]; (3) Radical Cogito [Interpretation]; (IV) Expression: Existential Phenomenology as Speaking: (1) Expression as Phenomena; (2)Langugae; (3) Tongue [Langue]; (4) Speaking [Parole]; (V) Introduction tothe Prose of the World.Definitive Bibliography of Merleau-Ponty's work[Primary Sources] and commentaries [Secondary Sources] on it (in eightlangugaes, including English). ... Read more

Book Description
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. ... Read more

Book Description

"Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own."

In 1948, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote and delivered on French radio a series of seven lectures on the theme of perception. Translated here into English for the first time, they offer a lucid and concise insight into one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth-century.

The lectures explore themes central not only to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy but to phenomenology as a whole. He begins by rejecting the idea - inherited from Descartes and influential within science - that perception is unreliable, prone to distort the world around us. Merleau-Ponty instead argues that perception is inseparable from our senses and it is how we make sense of the world.

Merleau-Ponty explores this guiding theme through a brilliant series of reflections on science, space, our relationships with others, animal life and art. Throughout, he argues that perception is never something learned and then applied to the world. As creatures with embodied minds, he reminds us that we are born perceiving and share with other animals and infants a state of constant, raw, unpredictable contact with the world. He provides vivid examples with the help of Kafka, animal behavior and above all modern art, particularly the work of Cezanne.

A thought-provoking and crystalline exploration of consciousness and the senses, The World of Perception is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Merleau-Ponty, twentieth-century philosophy and art.

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Finally, an effective way to introduce Merleau-Ponty
As a scholar whose intellectual life has been continually guided and inspired by the work of Merleau-Ponty for three and a half decades, I am overjoyed by the translation and publication of these seven radio lectures given by Merleau-Ponty in France in 1948. For the serious scholar, these are beautifully written and elegant statements about the heart of Merleau-Ponty's project to shift the ground of philosophy and phenomenology by diving into the depth of the perceptual world and turning to art as a touchstone for a reawakened perceptual experience. However, for the beginning philosophy student, they are wonderfully clear, engaging, and immediately comprehensible. For many of us, it has been frustrating that for the introductory student, much of Merleau-Ponty's oeuvre is intimidating or calls for a greater investment of concentration than many students are willing to make. This book is the perfect solution: it is brief, clear, and inviting. The perfect introduction... I can't recommend it highly enough! ... A sheer delight, as well as subtle, nuanced and evocative! ... Read more

Book Description
An Essay on the Communist Problem. ... Read more

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Contra Koestler
Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "Humanism and Terror" was intended, in 1946, to be an answer from the intellectuals still associated with the 'official' Communists to Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon: A Novel. Merleau-Ponty summarizes the book, addresses the challenge Koestler poses, and attempts to judge the USSR by the standards of "Marxist humanism" as he sees it. Nevertheless, the book is a very mixed bag.

The interesting thing about this book is that the preface, in which Merleau-Ponty does not address Koestler directly but instead deals with the trouble of Communism during the Stalinist period, the attempts to weigh means and ends, the desire for honesty vs the desire for pragmatism, the failure of people to face the dilemmas of history and the lack of seriousness on the part of liberal critics in this, and so on, is the most interesting part. This is all excellently written and clearly set out in unmistakable terms, at least for a Parisian philosopher.

The part of the book which discusses Koestler's thesis, however, is really poor. Merleau-Ponty ascribes to Koestler himself the views that Rubashov and his inquisitors share, namely a sort of Hegelian-mechanistic interpretation of History as the infallible guide of politics, and the risks and destructiveness this implies - but as is clear from an elementary reading of Koestler's book, he himself does not share this view at all, and precisely wrote the book to attack this viewpoint. It is really odd that someone with the philosophical and literary training of Merleau-Ponty does not see this.

In the subsequent discussion of Koestler's problematic itself, namely whether one can support communism but not communist policy, whether one can be a communist outside the Party, whether there can be such a thing as a democratic socialism, whether economic development is a prerequisite of such democratic socialism or not and what sacrifices are valid to achieve it, etc., Merleau-Ponty does not make this error as much. Yet here he makes a different error: especially in the discussion of the Moscow Trials, which take up the middle part of the book, he completely and uncritically adopts the Stalinist line. He believes every word in the 'confessions' of the accused to be actually intended and seriously meant by them (not writing a word about the torture applied before the Trials began), and he also uncritically adopts the Stalinist line that the suppression of all opposition was necessary to defend the USSR against foreign aggression. On the other hand, he clearly does not believe the actual charges themselves, for which there was blatantly no evidence whatever, as he freely admits. For Merleau-Ponty, the question is then reduced to why people like Bukharin and Trotsky would argue for the Party that 'had to' destroy them. An interesting dilemma, but an irrelevant one, since it is by no means necessary to adopt this assumption in the first place. Koestler's book is clearly superior to Merleau-Ponty's in this, since it makes no such assumption.

The last part of the book is the author's attempt to reconstitute the meaning of Marxism and its philosophy of history. Here, he does criticize the USSR quite strongly (for someone with sympathy for socialism in 1946), and his discussion of the merits and demerits of Trotsky's commentaries on this problem is quite good, if meanderingly written. There is still a lot of vague chatter about the dialectic and the proletariat in an abstract philosophical way, but it leads to several quite good points nonetheless, and advocates taking up a position that supports the Revolution of 1917 as well as communism in general, but without being uncritical towards the USSR or any specific form of Communist Parties and the like, and not binding oneself to having to defend it against better reason. He also engages the philosophical analysis undertaken by Koestler in The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays, and undertakes some effective and well-considered critiques of Koestler's metaphysical views in it, while admitting Koestler's own critiques as useful and valid, as it should be.

Here Merleau-Ponty concludes with the famous statement: "Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is _the_ philosophy of history, and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history. After that there remain only dreams and adventures."
That, at least, is and remains true.

Brilliant flashes but...
This is an amazing document to read in the 21st century.It amounts to a full-throated defense of the Moscow show trials used in the late 1930s by Stalin to purge all his potential rivals from the party and the government (usually by executing them).Specifically, Merleau-Ponty, who was one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, is arguing here contra-Koestler and "Darkness at Noon."Merleau-Ponty is quite right in arguing that liberal societies hide the violence (and terror) that they use to enforce their own order - an argument that come critics of Globalization, such as the outstanding R. Radhakrishnan, have deployed to excellent and edifying effect.However, most of the time, "Humanism and Terror" reads like a document from the inquisition in which the ideological backdrop of demonic possession, witchcraft and satanic heresy are taken at face-value and completely seriously by the author.In other words, it belongs entirely to another era.And of course, Merleau-Ponty`s continuous reliance on the judgement of history would tend to suggest that he and his arguments were "objectively incorrect" while the defendants were "proven right" (assuming, of course, that they were in some sense disloyal to the Soviet state). ... Read more

Book Description
Translated with a new introduction by John O'Neill Raymond Aron called Merleau-Ponty "the most influential French philosopher of his generation." First published in France in 1947, Humanism and Terror was in part a response to Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and in a larger sense a contribution to the political and moral debates of a postwar world suddenly divided into two ideological armed camps. For Merleau-Ponty, the central question was: could Communism transcend its violence and intentions?

The value of a society is the value it places upon man's relation to man, Merleau-Ponty examines not only the Moscow trials of the late thirties but also Koestler's re-creation of them. He argues that violence in general in the Communist world can be understood only in the context of revolutionary activism. He demonstrates that it is pointless to ask whether Communism respects the rules of liberal society; it is evident that Communism does not.

In post-Communist Europe, when many are addressing similar questions throughout the world, Merleau-Ponty's discourse is of prime importance; it stands as a major and provocative contribution to limits on the use of violence. The argument is placed in its current context in a brilliant new introduction by John O'Neill. His remarks extend the line of argument originally developed by the great French political philosopher. This is a major contribution to political theory and philosophy. ... Read more

Book Description
This volume is the first English translation of sixteen lectures by Maurice Merleau-Ponty given at the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1947-48 and reconstituted on the basis of notes taken by some of his most outstanding students.Devoted to three of the great names in the French philosphical tradition, Malebranche, Maine de Biran, and Bergson, these lectures center on a classic problem: the union of the soul and the body.

In these lectures Merleau-Ponty demonstrates how Malebranche had articulated an early phenomenology of the human condition, how Maine de Biran had anticipated the central project and related themes of the "Phenomenology of Perception", and how certain featuers of Bergson's method announce key elements of the philosophical methodology expressed in Merleau-Ponty's later works.This volume contains one of Merleau-Ponty's most sustained explications and critiques of Bergson's "Matter and Memory", and, more important, his only major presentation and critique of the thought of Maine de Biran.

This volume is indispensable for students of Merleau-Ponty and for those interested in French philosophy in general. ... Read more