ABSTRACT
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the most original and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Merleau-Ponty maintains that perception is not an isolated event or state in the mind or brain but an organism’s entire bodily relation to its environment. Regarding perception as our fundamental way of bodily being in the world poses a radical challenge to traditional distinctions between subject and object, inner and outer, mental and physical, mind and world. Bodily perspective grounds and informs culture, language, art, literature, history, science, and politics. Phenomenological insights are the keys to understanding his work, which speaks to but goes beyond metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind to include psychology, biology, culture, language, painting, history, and politics. Also unlike many philosophers in the analytical tradition, Merleau-Ponty adopts a deliberately nonadversarial dialectical strategy that is likely to seem alien, perhaps disconcerting, to students of the explicit theoretical assertions and refined argumentative techniques of contemporary academic philosophy.
