The World of Perception - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Written by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Read by Stephen Perring
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 32 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 2 hrs and 9 mins
Release date: 12-12-19
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Distribution

The author was one of the most important thinkers of the postwar 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.

From this starting point, the author presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception 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 the author’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.

Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own.’

In 1948, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote and delivered on French radio a series of seven lectures on the theme of perception. Translated here into English for the first time, they offer a lucid and concise insight into one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth-century.

These lectures explore themes central not only to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy but phenomenology as a whole. He begins by rejecting the idea - inherited from Descartes and influential within science - that perception is unreliable and prone to distort the world around us. Merleau-Ponty instead argues that perception is inseparable from our senses and it is how we make sense of the world.

Merleau-Ponty explores this guiding theme through a brilliant series of reflections on science, space, our relationships with others, animal life and art. Throughout, he argues that perception is never something learned and then applied to the world. As creatures with embodied minds, he reminds us that we are born perceiving and share with other animals and infants a state of constant, raw, unpredictable contact with the world. He provides vivid examples with the help of Kafka, animal behaviour and above all modern art, particularly the work of Cezanne.

A thought-provoking and crystalline exploration of consciousness and the senses, The World of Perception is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Merleau-Ponty, twentieth-century philosophy and art.