A wide ranging intellect As someone with strong backgrounds in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy I can only applaud M-P's wide-ranging curiosity and knowledge and his refusal to be limited by the artificial boundaries of academic disciplines. His discussion of the phenomenology of perception draws its data and conclusions from many areas--as long as they had something to offer in illuminating and analyzing this important area.
Among M-P's many contributions, there was also, as scholar Glen Mazis put it in one of his reviews here, M-P's "...project to shift the ground of philosophy and phenomenology by diving into the depth of the perceptual world and turning to art as a touchstone for a reawakened perceptual experience."
In this regard, I am reminded of the great but insufficiently appreciated philosopher, Samuel Alexander, who wrote in the early 20th century, in his major work, Space, Time, and Deity. Alexander was similarly eclectic, and moved back and forth between deduction, induction, historical argument, and between science and philosophy, without any sense of discontinuity whatever. In other words, he was willing to use whatever worked.
But getting back to M-P, this book represents M-P's thoroughgoing approach to the phenomenology of perception and in its determination to ground such analysis in the ordinary data of everyday life--much as G.E. Moore attempted to ground his metaphysics in very ordinary, everyday facts. M-P is to be commended for a similar approach in this book also in his The Phenomenology of Perception.
Flesh Ontology The working notes of this book are utterly staggering in their implication to ontology. What is being? Merleau answers in the manner of Lao-Tse, and alludes to something like a divine-feminine at the heart of wild perception. It was said by Sartre in his autobiography "Situations" that after Merleau's mother died who was like a "goddess" to him Merleau returned began the project anew. What is intimated in the working notes is invaluable to the true student of philosophy and life. And in the end, Merleau returns to the very object of his study. You can really feel this descent at the book nears its end. It is, however, an ascent of the entirety of the history of philosophy to a new level of comprehension. That I assure you.
Merleau-Ponty's Last Work The Visible and the Invisible is the last work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, left unfinished by his untimely death. (Does anyone really have a timely death?)
In this volume from Northwestern University Press, the unfinished text is appended by the working notes for the volume in an excellent translation by Alphonso Lingis with deft editing and a sterling introduction by Claude Lefort.
Merleau-Ponty, arguably the greatest philosopher of the Twentieth Century (he does not carry the baggage Heidegger does), was moving in this volume to a new determination of the relationship between phenomenology and ontology. Reading the volume and the working notes leads the reader to wonder how successful it would have been had Merleau-Ponty lived to publish it. As it is, it adds up to another of the intangibles taht make Western intellectual history such an enticing puzzle. Recommended for anyone interested in Twentieth Century philosophy.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Tony's Online Tips
Trevor
