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Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime. His father was killed in World War 1 when Merleau-Ponty was 3. After secondary schooling at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930.

Merleau-Ponty first taught at Chartres, then became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945).

After teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a Chair.

Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for Les Temps Modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952. Aged 53, he died suddenly of a stroke in 1961, apparently while preparing for a class on Descartes. He was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

]]> male Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime 1908/03/14 1961/05/03 18279 0415278414 9780415278416 17 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166893929m/18279.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166893929s/18279.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18279.Phenomenology_of_Perception 4.26 179 Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato.

]]> 118600 4.18 426 34 1976 203348 0810104571 9780810104570 4 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172646274m/203348.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172646274s/203348.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203348.The_Visible_and_the_Invisible 4.31 62 118600 4.18 426 34 1969 203350 0810101645 9780810101647 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172646275m/203350.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172646275s/203350.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203350.The_Primacy_of_Perception_And_Other_Essays_on_Phenomenological_Psychology_the_Philosophy_of_Art_History_and_Politics 4.07 42 118600 4.18 426 34 1964 211009 0810101661 9780810101661 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255710890m/211009.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255710890s/211009.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211009.Sense_and_Nonsense 4.00 22 118600 4.18 426 34 1964 203356 041531271X 9780415312714 4 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172646277m/203356.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172646277s/203356.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203356.The_World_of_Perception 3.94 17 "Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own."

In 1948, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote and delivered on French radio a series of seven lectures on the theme of perception. Translated here into English for the first time, they offer a lucid and concise insight into one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth-century.

The lectures explore themes central not only to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy but to phenomenology as a whole. He begins by rejecting the idea - inherited from Descartes and influential within science - that perception is unreliable, prone to distort the world around us. Merleau-Ponty instead argues that perception is inseparable from our senses and it is how we make sense of the world.

Merleau-Ponty explores this guiding theme through a brilliant series of reflections on science, space, our relationships with others, animal life and art. Throughout, he argues that perception is never something learned and then applied to the world. As creatures with embodied minds, he reminds us that we are born perceiving and share with other animals and infants a state of constant, raw, unpredictable contact with the world. He provides vivid examples with the help of Kafka, animal behavior and above all modern art, particularly the work of Cezanne.

A thought-provoking and crystalline exploration of consciousness and the senses, The World of Perception is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Merleau-Ponty, twentieth-century philosophy and art.

]]> 118600 4.18 426 34 221039 3.94 17 4 2004 203388 0820701637 9780820701639 2 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172646309m/203388.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172646309s/203388.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203388.Structure_of_Behavior 3.92 13 118600 4.18 426 34 1983 203351 0810114461 9780810114463 1 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172646275m/203351.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172646275s/203351.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203351.Nature_Course_Notes_from_the_Coll_ge_de_France 4.50 10 118600 4.18 426 34 2003 203354 0810101688 9780810101685 0 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203354.Signs 4.44 9 118600 4.18 426 34 1964 769906 0807002771 9780807002773 1 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178202943m/769906.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178202943s/769906.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/769906.Humanism_and_Terror_An_Essay_on_the_Communist_Problem 3.80 10 118600 4.18 426 34 1980 203357 0810106159 9780810106154 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1201741086m/203357.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1201741086s/203357.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203357.The_Prose_of_the_World 4.62 8 118600 4.18 426 34 1973