This is the first volume to bring together a comprehensive selection of Merleau-Ponty's writing. It presents a cross-section of his work that clearly shows the historical progression of his ideas and influence.

The work that Maurice Merleau-Ponty planned to call The Prose of the World, or Introduction to the Prose of the World, was unfinished at the time of his death. The book was to constitute the first section of a two-part work whose aim was to offer, as an extension of his Phenomenology of Perception, a theory of truth. This edition's editor, Claude Lefort, has interpreted and transcribed the surviving typescript, reproducing Merleau-Ponty's own notes and adding documentation and commentary.

'In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principle themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science – and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger.' - James Elkins Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the most important thinkers of the post-war era. Central to his thought was the idea that human understanding comes from our bodily experience of the world that we perceive: a deceptively simple argument, perhaps, but one that he felt had to be made in the wake of attacks from contemporary science and the philosophy of Descartes on the reliability of human perception. From this starting point, Merleau-Ponty presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception to French radio listeners in 1948. Available in a paperback English translation for the first time in the Routledge Classics series to mark the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth, this is a dazzling and accessible guide to a whole universe of experience, from the pursuit of scientific knowledge, through the psychic life of animals to the glories of the art of Paul Cézanne.

Buddhist philosophy of Anicca (impermanence), Dukkha (suffering), and

Merleau-Ponty's essays on aesthetics are some of the major accomplishments of his philosophical career, and rank even today among the most sophisticated reflections on art in all of twentieth-century philosophy. His essays on painting, "Cezanne's Doubt" (1945), "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" (1952), and "Eye and Mind" (1960), have inspired new approaches to epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of history. Galen A. Johnson has gathered these essays for the first time into a single volume and augmented them with essays by distinguished scholars and artists, including M.C. Dillon, Mikel Dufrenne, and René Magritte. Together the essays demonstrate the continuing significance of Merleau-Ponty's ideas about art for contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic.

A clear and comprehensive introduction to the thought of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Selected essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty published from 1947 to 1961.