Thinker
6 readings
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Thinker · 6 readings
Merleau-Ponty examines perception through bodily possibilities and engagement. Different capacities to reach, move or approach can change how a shared world is encountered.
All readings
6 readings · Title A–Z
Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 64
Describe experience before explaining it away
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty describe experience through three ideas: intentionality, bracketing and embodiment. How does a whole object appear through changing bodily perspectives?
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 6 of 9
Learning a way of moving
Learning a skill, or adapting to a changed tool, can alter what a body is able to do. Following Merleau-Ponty on the body schema and habit, the lesson asks whether his account gives fluency too much authority.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 8 of 9
Sharing a world without sharing one perspective
Merleau-Ponty describes meeting others in a shared bodily and cultural world, and the lesson compares his account with Husserl’s. Sharing an object or an exchange, it shows, is not the same as sharing access, agreement or justified belief.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 5 of 9
The body through which a world appears
Merleau-Ponty criticizes the picture of a mechanical body supplemented by an inner observer, and describes the lived body as access to a world. The lesson keeps the value of physical description and asks what reflection from within a situation can establish.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 9 of 9
What can a description establish?
The final lesson of the study separates description, constitutive argument, causal explanation and ethical judgment, and weighs Husserl and Merleau-Ponty against their critics. Its checkpoint asks what an exhibition committee should do next.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 7 of 9
When expression helps a thought take shape
Merleau-Ponty argues that expression can accomplish a thought rather than record a meaning already complete. The lesson distinguishes acquired language from emerging meaning, and both from truth.
Study this in sequence
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world
Follow Husserl and Merleau-Ponty from the appearance of a familiar thing to time, bodily skill, expression and other people. Test what their descriptions establish, where their methods differ and what still needs evidence or an ethical argument.