Philosopher of The Month: Maurice Merleau-Ponty [slideshow] | OUPblog

Panumas King, marketing executive for philosophy at Oxford University Press reports, "This July, the OUP Philosophy team honors Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61) as their Philosopher of the Month."  

Photo: The Card Player (5th version) (ca.1894-1895) by Paul Cezanne, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenologist and together with Sartre founded the existential philosophy. His work draws on the empirical psychology, the early phenomenology of Husserl, Saussure’s structuralism as well as Heidegger’s ontology.

His most famous work Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945, Phenomenology of Perception) established Merleau-Ponty as the philosopher of the body. The body is the centre of perceptions and medium of consciousness.  By this, he emphasized the way in which our experience does not form a shut-off private domain, but a way of being-in-the world in which the lived body and the perceptible world coexist internally...

Merleau-Ponty also has profound influence in the field of aesthetics and art theory.  His philosophy of painting rests on the three essays: ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’ and ‘Eye and Mind’.
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Source: OUPblog (blog)