The World of Perception

'Merleau-Ponty... 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 Descartes and contemporary science on the reliability of perception. From this starting point, Merleau-Ponty presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception . 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 to the art of Paul Cèzanne. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). One of the century's leading phenomenologists and a founder, with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, of Les Temps Modernes. He is the author of The Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge Classics, 2002).Maurice Merleau-Ponty is the author of 'The World of Perception', published 2008 under ISBN 9780415773812 and ISBN 0415773814.