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Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908-1961  -  France

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Questions of 

Reading

Writing Available on the Internet

The Structure of Behavior

Commentary

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Garth Kemerling PhilosophyPages.com

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Existentialism and Beyond

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Danne Polk Erratic Impact (PRB)

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Alliance for Lifelong Learning

Primozic, Daniel Thomas; On Merleau-Ponty (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2001)

Sahakian, Wm. S.; History of Philosophy (New York: Barnes & Noble, Harper; 1968)

Quotations

"we are condemned to meaning."

Merleau's Primacy of Perception, published in 1945, explains his theory of perception.

[Our experience of perception comes from our being present] at the moment when things, truths, and values are constituted for us; that perception is a nascent Logos; that it teaches us, outside of all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself; that is summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action. It is not a question of reducing human knowledge to sensation, but of assisting at the birth of this knowledge, to make it as sensible as the sensible, to recover the consciousness of rationality. This experience of rationality is lost when we take it for granted as self-evident, but is, on the contrary, rediscovered when it is made to appear against the background of non-human nature.