Sensible World and the World of Expression : Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice; Smyth, Bryan (TRN)

ISBN 10: 0810141426 / ISBN 13: 9780810141421

Published by Northwestern University Press, 2020

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 35461084-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Sensible World and the World of Expression : Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810141426
• ISBN 13: 9780810141421
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The Sensible World and the World of Expression was a course of lectures that Merleau-Ponty gave at the Collège de France after his election to the chair of philosophy in 1952. The publication and translation of Merleau-Ponty’s notes from this course provide an exceptional view into the evolution of his thought at an important point in his career. 

In these notes, we see that Merleau-Ponty’s consideration of the problem of the perception of movement leads him to make a self-critical return to Phenomenology of Perception in order to rethink the perceptual encounter with the sensible world as essentially expressive, and hence to revise his understanding of the body schema accordingly in terms of praxical motor possibilities. Sketching out an embodied dialectic of expressive praxis that would link perception with art, language, and other cultural and intersubjective phenomena, up to and including truth, Merleau-Ponty’s notes for these lectures thus afford an exciting glimpse of how he aspired to overcome the impasse of ontological dualism. 

Situated midway between Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, these notes mark a juncture of crucial importance with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s later efforts to work out the ontological underpinnings of phenomenology in terms of a new dialectical conception of nature and history.

About the Author

MAURICE MERLEAU‑PONTY (1908–1961) is the author of Adventures of the Dialectic, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, In Praise of Philosophy,Institution and Passivity, Nature, The Primacy of Perception, The Prose of the World, Sense and Non‑Sense, Signs, and The Visible and the Invisible, all published by Northwestern University Press.

BRYAN SMYTH is a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Mississippi and the author of Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy.