Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher who taught at Lyon, the Sorbonne and, from 1952, the Collège de France. Building on Husserl and on Gestalt psychology, he argued in Phenomenology of Perception that perception is embodied: the perceiver is not a detached mind but a lived body already engaged with its world. His work is a central source for later embodied and enactive approaches to mind.

Key ideas

• The lived body, not a disembodied consciousness, is the subject of perception.
• Perception is primary: we are open to a meaningful world before any theoretical judgement about it.
• Bodily skills and habits give us a pre-reflective grasp of space and objects (motor intentionality).
• Both empiricism and intellectualism misdescribe perception by starting from sensations or from judgements.

Major works

• The Structure of Behaviour (La Structure du comportement, 1942)
• Phenomenology of Perception (Phénoménologie de la perception, 1945)
• Sense and Non-Sense (Sens et non-sens, 1948)
• The Visible and the Invisible (Le Visible et l'invisible, 1964, posthumous)

In the conversation

• Question What is the epoché, and why would bracketing whether the world exists help anyone? Bec Doyle · 4 replies
• Question When I look at a plate, am I seeing the plate or a picture my brain makes of it? Rin Matsuda · 4 replies
• Reading group Reading group: Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Part One on the body Claire Dubois · 5 replies
• Debate Dreyfus’s critique of AI has aged better than Searle’s Chinese Room Derek Hollis · 7 replies
• Discussion ‘The Fact of Blackness’ or ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’? What a translation choice did to Fanon Sana Rizvi · 5 replies
• Debate Classical phenomenology described one kind of body and called it the structure of experience Keisha Monroe · 5 replies
• Discussion Seeing before naming: are Dignāga and Merleau-Ponty saying the same thing about perception? Claire Dubois · 5 replies