Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6495 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780415278416
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
It is very good to have an English translation of this work. Especially valuable is the preface to the present work where Merleau-Ponty gives his views on phenomenology itself. - Heythrop Journal

Merleau-Ponty was one of the most substantial French philosophers of the twentieth century. - Times Literary Supplement

The work of Merleau-Ponty has never been more timely, or had more to teach us. Essential reading for anyone who cares about the embodied mind.
–Andy Clarke, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Cognitive Science Program, Indiana University

Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)

Customer Reviews

Routledge Murders a Great Work
Merleau-Ponty's work is nothing less than a classic, one of the great works of philosophy in the 20th century. It should go without saying, then, that this work should be made available in an up-to-date and scholarly translation.
Unfortunately, this is what Routledge has refused to do. Not only does this "new" edition maintain all of the known mistakes and inconsistencies of the original translation (most of which were not corrected when the translation was revised twenty years ago), but it also introduces literally dozens of type-setting errors. In addition to all of the obvious mistakes in punctuation and spelling (e.g., "intelfection" on p. xx; "in a world" instead of "in a word" on p. 129; "deralizes" for "derealizes" on p. 140; "writes" for "writers," p. 163; "Rinswanger" for "Binswanger," note 6, p. 185, and the list goes on and on), you will also encounter such lovely gems as "Bergson's inferiority" (instead of "interiority", p. 67) and "adduction" transformed into "abduction" -- when distinguishing between the two is precisely the point of Merleau-Ponty's discussion (p. 243). In short, an already flawed translation has now been bungled into a bloody mess. If you are reading this book for the first time, you would be well-advised to check the used bookstores for a copy of the earlier edition. If you are trying to use this text with students, lots of luck to you!
It is also worth mentioning that Routledge has again failed to include a translation of Merleau-Ponty's original table of contents in this edition, so that many English readers are still unaware that he provided a detailed outline of the entire text to guide the reader. A translation by Daniel Guerriere is available in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 10, no. 1 (1979) - although, of course, the page numbers no longer correspond to this "new" edition.

If only philosophers would follow his lead today!
As shown in his first book, The Structure of Behavior, and this extension of that piece, Merleau-Ponty was a philosopher who was way ahead of his time.

While Husserl was off sputtering abstractly about phenomenology and 'essences', Merleau-Ponty planted himself squarely into the concrete, thick, world of lived experience: this book is a detailed phenomenological description of of attention, memory, space-perception, free will, and other psychological/phenomenological categories. M-P claims that simply by paying attention to this lifeworld, we see that previous philosophical systems have overlooked ineliminable dimensions of what it is like to be a person, and that this oversight has led to radically incomplete philosophical accounts of things like memory, perception, etc..

The book is so rich, original, and nuanced that it is hard to do it justice in a short review here. Not saddling himself with narrow academic techniques or fields, he draws on any resources he can to come to make sense of human experience. He cites not only philosophers such as Heidegger and Sarte, but draws equally heavily upon the Gestalt psychologists and neuroscientists of his day. He discusses phantom limbs, experiments on spatial perception, and psychophysical results from the Gestalt psychologists.

Many ideas that are popular in modern analytic philosophy and psychology can be found in this book: the view that 'sense data' are simply theoretical constructs, the view that attention focuses on objects not abstract spatial locations, and the claim that our original concepts cannot be understood independently of the embodied interactions with the world where we first come to use them.

I fear that Merleau-Ponty's nuanced philosophical psychology will fall through the cracks, being ignored by continental philosophers who focus on other things nowadays, and also by English speaking philosophers who dismiss Merleau-Ponty because he is a continental philosopher.

If you consider yourself a philosopher of mind, epistemologist, or a continental philosopher, please read this book. Twice.

The best phil. of mind book that no Anglophone ever reads.
Well, not narrowly on the philosophy of mind; that'd be an analytic-biased description (and one that leaves out all the things such people may extraneous and annoying in this book).

The field of philosophy of mind in Anglophone philosophy has all but ignored Merleau-Ponty's work, much to its disadvantage. Connectionism and dynamic systems theory as applied to the mental are seen as a "new" development, but the Gestalt psychologists and Merleau-Ponty had very much the same ideas long before. And a bunch of other ones, which to Anglophone ears may sound like they're from that other planet which lies across the Channel, but which deserve to be taken seriously.

Warning: this book is HARD to read, all the more so because of cultural differences between analytic and continental philosophers. The translation is also not very good; if you can read French, go for the original. It helps to read other work ABOUT Merleau-Ponty; M.C. Dillon's "Merleau-Ponty's Ontology" is the best book I've found in this regard.

Also, I think it's better to first read the following two things before tackling the book: (a) M-P's "The Primacy of Perception" (the lecture, collected in the book of the same name) for a shorter summary of his goals with the book; (b) the first chapter (and maybe the second, too) of his first book The Structure of Behavior, which discusses in great detail Merleau-Ponty's understanding of Gestalt Psychology (M-P actually refers the reader to this material repeatedly in the first few chapters of the Phenomenology of Perception).