Merleau-Ponty, Maurice

(1908-1961)

   philosopher

   A leading existential philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenological studies of the role of the body in perception opened a new area of philosophical discourse, was born in Rochefort and taught at the University of lyon, the sorbonne, and the collège de FRANCE.His first important writings were Structure du comportement (1942), Sens et Non-Sens (1948), and Signes (1960). Another early major work, Phénoménologie de la perception (1945), is a detailed study of perception, influenced by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and by Gestalt psychology. in it, he argues that science presupposes an original and unique perceptual relationship to the world that cannot be described or explained in scientific terms. it is a critique of cognitivism and of the existentialism of jean-paul sartre who, unlike Merleau-Ponty, argued that human freedom is total and is not limited by our embodiment. Merleau-Ponty studied Marxism but never accepted its economic and materialistic explanations of the historical process.