Phenomenology of Perception

Introduction

Merleau-Ponty submitted the book as his main doctoral thesis; it appeared in Paris in 1945. Its preface describes phenomenology as a method that is never completed: the most important lesson of the reduction is that a complete reduction is impossible. Against both empiricism and intellectualism, the book analyses perception as the work of a living body. It draws heavily on psychology and neurology, especially on Schneider, a brain-injured patient studied by Gelb and Goldstein who could perform habitual movements but not abstract ones, and on the phantom limb. Further chapters treat sexuality, speech, space, other people, time and freedom. The book is a main source for today’s theories of embodied cognition.

Connections

Builds on

• Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology1913 · Edmund Husserl

Criticizes

• Meditations on First Philosophy1641 · René Descartes
• Being and Nothingness1943 · Jean-Paul Sartre

Taken up in

• Black Skin, White Masks1952 · Frantz Fanon
• The Visible and the Invisible1964 · Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• Throwing Like a Girl1980 · Iris Marion Young

More works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

• 1964The Visible and the Invisible