This title offers a comprehensive view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's work, this selection collecting in one volume the foundational essays necessary for understanding the core of this critical 20th-century philosopher's thought.

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.

This title offers a comprehensive view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's work, this selection collecting in one volume the foundational essays necessary for understanding the core of this critical 20th-century philosopher's thought.

McAllestar (computer science, MIT) describes ONTIC, the interactive system for verifying represents a significant change of direction in the field of mechanical deduction, a key area in computer science and artificial intelligence. Fourteen interrelated essays comprise a multifaceted dialogue about intersubjectivity, reciprocity, and the nature of self and other, especially as these themes are developed in Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the invisible. The question they explore is whether the reversible alterity of sensing and being sensed, a theme at the heart of Merleau-Ponty's thought, is sufficient for understanding the alterity of other persons and of nature. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Merleau-Ponty's Reading of Husserl explores the relationship between two of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century: Edmund Husserl, the father of modern phenomenology, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, considered by many to be his greatest philosophical heir. While Merleau-Ponty's influence on the dissemination and reception of Husserl's thought is indisputable, unresolved questions remain concerning the philosophical projects of these two thinkers: Does phenomenology first reach its true potential in Merleau-Ponty's hands, guided by his appreciation of the tacit goals underlying Husserl's philosophical project? Or is Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology a creative but ultimately misdirected appropriation of Husserl's work? In this volume, the first devoted to a comparison of the work of these two philosophers, ten leading scholars draw on the latest research and newly available manuscripts to offer novel insights into Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl - with implications for our understanding of phenomenology's significance, its method, and the future of philosophy.

In our time, Ted Toadvine observes, the philosophical question of nature is almost entirely forgotten—obscured in part by a myopic focus on solving "environmental problems" without asking how these problems are framed. But an "environmental crisis," existing as it does in the human world of value and significance, is at heart a philosophical crisis. In this book, Toadvine demonstrates how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has a special power to address such a crisis—a philosophical power far better suited to the questions than other modern approaches, with their over-reliance on assumptions drawn from the natural sciences. The book examines key moments in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature while roughly following the historical sequence of his major works. Toadvine begins by setting out an ontology of nature proposed in Merleau-Ponty’s first book, The Structure of Behavior. He takes up the theme of the expressive role of reflection in Phenomenology of Perception, as it negotiates the area between nature’s own "self-unfolding" and human subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of "intertwining" and his account of space provide a transition to Toadvine’s study of the philosopher’s later work—in which the concept of "chiasm," the crossing or intertwining of sense and the sensible, forms the key to Merleau-Ponty’s mature ontology—and ultimately to the relationship between humans and nature.

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