Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty is an important figure in the Phenomenological Tradition, whose work is dedicated to one central question: how should we understand ourselves and our place in the world? For him, we are not – as Descartes thought – Spirit, essentially different from the world of Matter. We are our bodies. The challenge is to reconceive…

Merleau-Ponty is an important figure in the Phenomenological Tradition, whose work is dedicated to one central question: how should we understand ourselves and our place in the world? For him, we are not – as Descartes thought – Spirit, essentially different from the world of Matter. We are our bodies. The challenge is to reconceive all we thought we knew to accommodate this fundamental mystery.

Merleau-Ponty is one of my favourite philosophers, and I have returned to his work again and again. I have written the Routledge GuideBook to his Phenomenology of Perception, and his ideas are the subject of many of my papers.

In March 2025, I was invited as an expert guest for an episode of In Our Time on Merleau-Ponty, with Melvyn Bragg – one of the last sessions before he retired.