President's Office Divisions ... Links Maurice Merleau-Ponty - Biography Maurice Merleau-Ponty La Structure du Comportement (1942) and his the Structure of Behavior and the Phenomenology of Perception Merleai-Ponty served in the infantry when in World War II broke out. He began collaborating with his friend and co-founding editor of Les Temps Modernes, Jean-Paul Sartre from 1945 to 1952. However, he became disillusioned with the Korean War, and Sartrian politics, and decided to resign from the editorial board of what would soon become Sartre's journal. The nature of Merleau-Ponty's disagreements with Sartre are formulated in the Adventures of the Dialectic, published in 1955. It is an exhaustive analysis of Sartre's relationship to communism, criticizing his privileging of the subject-object relations in his version of phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty was greatly influenced by Husserl, and in his own work he attempted to refute the tendencies in Western philosophy of empiricism and what he called intellectualism, or what is commonly referred to as idealism. He challenged the thinking of dualisms, of subject and object, self and world, through the lived experience of the existential body, as revealed in his ( The Phenomenology of Perception ). He argued that the 'body subject' was frequently underestimated in philosophy, which tends to view the body as something to be transcended by the power of the mind. For this reason, he was interested in the 'primacy of perception', as a place of embodied inherence in the world, while admitting that perception itself is primarily cognitive. His opposition to the knowledge of scientific and analytic methods was based on their derivative relation to knowledge as compared to the practical thinking of an embodied relation to the world. | |
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