Phenomenology of Perception

Merleau-Ponty's main work, published in 1945. Its preface asks what phenomenology is and concludes that the reduction can never be completed, because we are always already in the world. The introduction rejects two 'classical prejudices': empiricism, which builds perception out of sensations, and intellectualism, which makes it a judgement of the mind. Part One puts the lived body at the centre. Using cases such as the phantom limb and Schneider, a brain-injured patient who could grasp things but not point to them on command, Merleau-Ponty argues that the body is not an object we own but our way of having a world, with its own motor intentionality and body schema; even speech is a bodily gesture. Part Two describes the perceived world: sensing, space and depth, things, and other people. Part Three reworks the cogito, temporality and freedom, arguing that freedom is always situated in a field of meanings it did not choose.

It offers the most developed account of the body as the subject of experience, and is a key source for today's work on embodied cognition, the phenomenology of illness and perception.