Annotated Bibliography: Merleau-Ponty - Phenomenology of Perception.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge, Great Britian, 2008).

Within the Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues the inadequacies of traditional empiricism and rationalism in the description of perceptual phenomenology.

Perception ultimately deal with the assignment of meaning to the external world, the overlapping of human consciousness with the conditions of existence.

He describes the body not as a geometric object but as a spatiality of situation structured by the determination of consciousness through perceptions and perceptions through consciousness.

“It is well known that a poem, though it has superficial meaning translatable into prose, leads, in the reads mind, a further existence which makes it a poem. Just as the spoken word is significant not only through the medium of individual words, but also that of accent, intonation, gesture and facial expression, and as these additional meanings no longer reveal the speakers thoughts but the source of his thoughts and his fundamental manner of being, so poetry, which is perhaps accidentally narrative and in that way informative, is essentially a variety of existence”. – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Page 174.

Part three of the book is particularly good and contains the chapters on cogito, temporality and freedom, while other chapters of interest include The Phenomenal Field, The Body as Expression, and Speech, Sense Experience and the chapter on Space.

Admittedly, this is a particularly difficult book to read, and while I enjoyed the challenge of reading it I cannot claim to have grasped its full depth.

Merleau-Ponty references: Husserl, Koffka, Sartre, Kant, Descartes and Scheler, among others.

Merleau-Ponty is cited by: Many authors and theorists, including Stephen Holl, Malpas, Heidegger, Giddens, Tilley and Casey.

Keywords: Perception, phenomenology, consciousness, existentialism, philosophy, body and object.