22 Facts About Maurice Merleau-Ponty

1.

Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.

2.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.

3.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences.

4.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and maintained that the perceiving body and its perceived world could not be disentangled from each other.

5.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908 in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Inferieure, France.

6.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's father died in 1913 when Merleau-Ponty was five years old.

7.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty attended Edmund Husserl's "Paris Lectures" in February 1929.

8.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was friends with the Christian existentialist author and philosopher Gabriel Marcel and wrote articles for the Christian leftist journal Esprit, but he left the Catholic Church in 1937 because he felt his socialist politics were not compatible with the social and political doctrine of the Catholic Church.

9.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty taught first at the Lycee de Beauvais and then got a fellowship to do research from the Caisse nationale de la recherche scientifique.

10.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty participated in an armed demonstration against the Nazi forces during the liberation of Paris.

11.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the College de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a chair.

12.

Besides his teaching, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was political editor for the leftist journal Les Temps modernes from its founding in October 1945 until December 1952.

13.

Kuby states that while Maurice Merleau-Ponty was not a member of the French Communist Party and did not identify as a Communist, he laid out an argument justifying the Soviet farce trials and political violence for progressive ends in general in the work Humanism and Terror in 1947.

14.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was active in the French non-communist left and in particular in the Union of the Democratic Forces.

15.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 at age 53, apparently while preparing for a class on Rene Descartes, leaving an unfinished manuscript which was posthumously published in 1964, along with a selection of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's working notes, by Claude Lefort as The Visible and the Invisible.

16.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris with his mother Louise, his wife Suzanne and their daughter Marianne.

17.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty therefore underlines the fact that there is an inherence of consciousness and of the body of which the analysis of perception should take account.

18.

For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it is these uses of the notion of style that lead Malraux to postulate a cleavage between the objectivity of Italian Renaissance painting and the subjectivity of painting in his own time, a conclusion that Maurice Merleau-Ponty disputes.

19.

In Maurice Merleau-Ponty's account, whereas art is an attempt to capture an individual's perception, science is anti-individualistic.

20.

For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, science neglects the depth and profundity of the phenomena that it endeavors to explain.

21.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty understood science to be an ex post facto abstraction.

22.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty has been picked up by Australian and Nordic philosophers inspired by the French feminist tradition, including Rosalyn Diprose and Sara Heinamaa.