The Significance of the Body in Philosophy

In this lecture I would like therefore to do a couple of things. Firstly, I would like to provide some brief biographical background on Merleau-Ponty. Then, I would like to talk about Merleau-Ponty’s primary philosophical method: existential phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty, in my view at least, is one of the most interesting innovators of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method. Merleau-Ponty was, with the exception of perhaps Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading exponent of Phenomenology in France. Then, I will proceed to explain what Merleau-Ponty means by perception and conclude with Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body.

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