World of Perception - 9780415312714

In 1948, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote and delivered on French radio a series of seven lectures exploring the world as we perceive it and explaining its importance. Translated here into English for the first time, they offer insight into one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth century.
The lectures explore themes central not only to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy but phenomenology as a whole. He begins by rejecting the idea - inherited from Descartes and influential within science - that perception is unreliable, prone to distort the world around us. Merleau-Ponty instead argues that the world as we perceive it is the real world.
Merleau-Ponty explores this guiding theme through a series of reflections on science, space, our relationships with others, animal life and art. Throughout, he argues, our understanding is rooted in bodily experience of the perceived world, including experiences of the presence of other people, and equally of other animals.
He provides vivid examples with the help of Kafka, studies of animal behaviour and above all modern art, particularly the work of Cezanne and his famous saying, 'as I paint, I draw'.
An exploration of consciousness and the senses, The World of Perception is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Merleau-Ponty, twentieth-century philosophy and art.