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Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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Born: March 13 1908

Died: 0202 05 19611961

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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 and Phénoménologie de la Perception .

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.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Books from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Phenomenology of Perception

The Visible and the Invisible

The World of Perception

The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics

L'Œil et l'Esprit

Sense and Non-Sense

Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

The Structure of Behavior

The Prose of the World

The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting

Signs

The Merleau-Ponty Reader

Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

La duda de Cézanne

Filosofisia kirjoituksia

Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

Lof der wijsbegeerte: Inaugurale rede uitgesproken voor het Collège de France op donderdag 15 januari 1953

Elogio della filosofia

Προοίμιο στη φαινομενολογία της αντίληψης

Έννοιες της τέχνης στον 20ό αιώνα