- Paperback: 488 pages
- Publisher: Routledge; New edition edition (25 Mar 1982)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0415045568
- ISBN-13: 978-0415045568
- Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 13.7 x 3.8 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 352,698 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £5.35
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Phenomenology of Perception for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £5.35, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
|
There is a newer edition of this item:
|
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
'Merleau-Ponty was one of the most substantial French philosophers of the twentieth century.' - Times Literary Supplement
Review
'Merleau-Ponty was one of the most substantial French philosophers of the twentieth century.' - Times Literary Supplement
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
Our perception ends in objects, and the object once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experiences of it which we have had or could have. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
Our perception ends in objects, and the object once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experiences of it which we have had or could have. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
72 of 76 people found the following review helpful
If only philosophers would follow his lead today!
17 Mar 2001
Format:Paperback
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.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Counterpiece
18 Aug 2001
Format:Paperback
Originally, I read this book as part of a Philosophy of the Body course, in companion with Sartre's magnum opus, Being and Nothingness. Trying to keep the two thinkers separate was quite easy, because of the difference in approach and ideas that they both take. Sartre relies on a dualism and intellectualism not easily understood, resulting in a complex and amorphous work, which is still utterly powerful.
M-P, however, as one review said, remains in the concrete experience of everyday life. Perception, the way the mind interprets the senses, the importance of memory, time, and freedom in the world, are all utterly important in this work. M-P provides a work which attempts to synthesize psychology, physicality, and philosophy resulting in a more holistic and foundational work than many 20th century philosophers.
This book can be read as philosophy or psychology, in fact, any course on perception in a Psychology department should read it. Anyone wishing to discuss the question of Pontius Pilate ("What is truth?") should read this book. It touches on so many themes of intellectual life that it will become perhaps the most influential work of philosophy of the 20th century, vying with Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Heidegger's Being and Time.
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful
A Classic of 20th Century Thought
18 Nov 2000
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
When all is said and done (and that will take a while) on the studies of philosophy in the 20th century, two names will stand out as being the most influential: Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Phenomenology of Perception was Merleau-Ponty's second work and lays the foundation for his later writings. What Merleau-Ponty attempts to do in this work is to take phenomenology away from the idealist and dualistic tracks of Husserl and Sartre and ground it firmly in ontology through a psychological analysis of perception. In doing so, Merleau-Ponty lays the foundations for Structuralism and its later incarnations, for better or worse, Poststructuralism and Deconstructuralism. (Derrida and Foucault attended his lectures.)Required reading for any student of 20th century thought and anyone who wants to know how philosophy came to its present position.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
