Maurice Merleau-Ponty

is concerned with identifying an alternative to intellectualism or idealism, on the one hand, and empiricism or realism, on the other, by critiquing their common presupposition of a ready-made world and failure to account for the historical and embodied character of experience.

Although phenomenology provided the overarching framework for these investigations, Merleau-Ponty also drew freely on empirical research in psychology and ethology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and the arts. His constant points of historical reference are Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. The characteristic approach of Merleau-Ponty's theoretical work is his effort to identify an alternative to intellectualism or idealism, on the one hand, and empiricism or realism, on the other, by critiquing their common presupposition of a ready-made world and failure to account for the historical and embodied character of experience.

is a thinker concerned with how perception and embodiment serve as a starting point for clarifying the relation between the mind and the body, the objective world and the experienced world, expression in language and art, history, politics, and nature.

Merleau-Ponty focused on the problems of perception and embodiment as a starting point for clarifying the relation between the mind and the body, the objective world and the experienced world, expression in language and art, history, politics, and nature.

is a philosopher whose great contribution was to bring in the body as our way of being in the world.

Merleau-Ponty? I'm very much more impressed with Merleau-Ponty. I think he's a great philosopher and will survive. His great contribution was to bring in the body as our way of being in the world. There are two big gaps in Being and Time. One of them is that Heidegger never talks about the body or even about skills or practices. I put all that in to explain the ready-to-hand in the understanding of Being. Now, Merleau-Ponty, because he does talk about the body--and it's the body that acquires skills--he answers Sartre for one thing. He says we're not free, we're restricted by having the same sort of bodies everyone has and by the fact that what we do becoming habits in our bodies and skills in our bodies, which we're not arbitrarily free to change. And this both answers Sartre and in a way, oddly enough, Merleau-Ponty answering Sartre, who was like Husserl, reinvents Heidegger, but filling in the gaps.

Maurice Merleau Ponty, n.All

Maurice Merleau Ponty