{"title":"Books by Maurice Merleau-Ponty","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780415773812","title":"The World of Perception","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e'In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principle themes. He 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.'\u003c\/strong\u003e - \u003cem\u003eJames Elkins\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMaurice 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 contemporary science and the philosophy of Descartes on the reliability of human perception.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom this starting point, Merleau-Ponty presented these seven lectures on \u003cem\u003eThe World of Perception\u003c\/em\u003e to French radio listeners in 1948. 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, through the psychic life of animals to the glories of the art of Paul Cézanne.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56290141274485,"sku":"9780415773812","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780415773812_f62bd0e4-d60e-4098-8bbb-1eda729bece2.jpg?v=1786013564"},{"product_id":"9780415834339","title":"Phenomenology of Perception","description":"\u003cp\u003eFirst published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s monumental \u003cem\u003ePhénoménologie de la perception \u003c\/em\u003esignalled the arrival of a major new philosophical and intellectual voice in post-war Europe. Breaking with the prevailing picture of existentialism and phenomenology at the time, it has become one of the landmark works of twentieth-century thought. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhenomenology of Perception \u003c\/em\u003estands in the great phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is decisive, as he brings this tradition and other philosophical predecessors, particularly Descartes and Kant, to confront a neglected dimension of our experience: the lived body and the phenomenal world. Charting a bold course between the reductionism of science on the one hand and intellectualism on the other, Merleau-Ponty argues that we should regard the body not as a mere biological or physical unit, but as the body which structures one’s situation and experience within the world.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMerleau-Ponty enriches his classic work with engaging studies of famous cases in the history of psychology and neurology as well as phenomena that continue to draw our attention, such as phantom limb syndrome, synaesthesia, and hallucination. This new translation includes many helpful features such as the reintroduction of Merleau-Ponty’s discursive Table of Contents as subtitles into the body of the text, a comprehensive Translator’s Introduction to its main themes, essential notes explaining key terms of translation, an extensive Index, and an important updating of Merleau-Ponty’s references to now available English translations.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlso included is a new foreword by Taylor Carman and an introduction to Merleau-Ponty by Claude Lefort.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTranslated by Donald A. Landes.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311755669877,"sku":"9780415834339","price":37.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780415834339_ccc79930-03cb-4054-9f77-4ed7fc8ccca9.jpg?v=1786013643"},{"product_id":"investigations-into-the-literary-use-of-language","title":"Investigations Into the Literary Use of Language","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA closely annotated translation of Merleau-Ponty's lecture notes on literary language\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eInvestigations into the Literary Use of Language\u003c\/i\u003e presents an annotated translation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's lecture notes from one of the two courses that he gave during his inaugural year teaching at the Collège de France. In his notes from the concurrent course, \u003ci\u003eThe Sensible World and the World of Expression\u003c\/i\u003e, Merleau-Ponty contends that our embodied perceptual engagement with the sensible world already involves the same spontaneity that underlies cultural expression. Approaching it from the other side, he revisits here the analysis of language that he had undertaken in the unfinished manuscript \u003ci\u003eThe Prose of the World\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFocusing on the work of Paul Valéry (1871–1945) and Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783–1842), Merleau-Ponty explores how the spontaneity of literary language sheds light on the relation between lived experience and language more broadly, and how cultural expression remains grounded in embodied perceptual experience in a way that is homologous yet irreducible to it. Specifically, Merleau-Ponty shows how Stendhal had already overcome Valéry's skepticism concerning literary sincerity by effectively incorporating what the latter called the linguistic \"implex\"—in effect, language as institution—and thus achieving a \"total style\" of improvisational spontaneity in which the \"conquering function\" characteristic of the literary use of language gives shape to an immanent model of political engagement.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57499331166581,"sku":"9780810149816","price":26.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780810149816.jpg?v=1792511726"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-maurice-merleau-ponty.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}