ABSTRACT
Merleau-Ponty’s influence on intellectual life in the near halfcentury since his death has been solid and steady, yet somewhat less spectacular than one might expect, considering the power of his ideas and their increasing relevance to contemporary philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. His reputation in philosophy proper has tended to be overshadowed by the other major figures in phenomenology: Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. Husserl and Heidegger were of course the pioneers of phenomenology, while Sartre’s literary brilliance and versatility made him a more charismatic intellectual celebrity in the heyday of existentialism. Unlike Merleau-Ponty, Sartre also had the good fortune of surviving into the 1960s and 1970s to see a younger generation of readers take renewed interest in his work. Later, with the rise of structuralism in France and the United States, Merleau-Ponty was all too often dismissed as belonging to a bygone era marked by naïve philosophical earnestness, in contrast to the more thoroughly criticalindeed, often ironic and evasive-styles of discourse that became fashionable in the meantime, especially in literary theory and cultural studies.
