Phenomenology of Perception

Recommended by Michael Fried, and 1 others. See all reviews

Ranked #33 in Aesthetics

Together with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was the foremost French philosopher of the post-war period and Phenomenology of Perception, first published in 1945, is his masterpiece. What makes this work so important is that it returned the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. less

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Michael Fried Yes. Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher from the 40s and 50s, a contemporary of Sartre and De Beauvoir. I read him for the first time in my early 20s before his works were translated. He represents so-called ‘existential phenomenology’. Of fundamental importance to him was that we are ‘embodied’ creatures, not disembodied perceptual systems and free-floating intelligences. He understood painting to be involved in a network of relations in which embodiment is crucial to the creation and experience of the work. (Source)


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