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The Wisdom of the Body: Merleau-Ponty and the Philosophy of Ambiguity
Paperback
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ISBN13: 9798185011775
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 30 2026
Pages: 428
Weight: 1.25
Height: 0.87 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 30 2026
Pages: 428
Weight: 1.25
Height: 0.87 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
We are taught to believe that the mind is the pilot and the body its vehicle - that somewhere behind the eyes a thinking thing issues orders to a machine of flesh. Maurice Merleau-Ponty spent his life dismantling that comfortable picture. The most humane of the great French philosophers, he argued that we know the world first not by thinking about it but by living in it: that perception comes before reflection, that the body is the seat of understanding rather than its servant, and that meaning is born in the meeting of a moving creature and the world it inhabits.
This book follows his thought from beginning to end, in plain language and without a single equation. It begins with his insistence that we return to ordinary experience before the sciences explain it away, moves through his revolutionary account of the lived body, his writing on speech and painting, his meditations on time, freedom, and other people, and arrives at the haunting late vision of the flesh - the idea that the one who sees and the thing seen are cut from a single fabric.
For anyone who has ever wondered what it is actually like to be a perceiving body in a living world, here is a guide: clear, witty, and quietly astonished at the ordinary.
Keywords: phenomenology, perception, embodiment, consciousness, philosophy of mind, lived experience, Merleau-Ponty
For anyone who has ever wondered what it is actually like to be a perceiving body in a living world, here is a guide: clear, witty, and quietly astonished at the ordinary.
Keywords: phenomenology, perception, embodiment, consciousness, philosophy of mind, lived experience, Merleau-Ponty
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