Rating: 
Summary: supposedly his opus....
Review: ....but his phenomenological concepts are much more alive and readable in his later material--his essays, for instance. I even liked his unfinished VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE better.
Rating:
Summary: supposedly his opus....
Review: ....but his phenomenological concepts are much more alive and readable in his later material--his essays, for instance. I even liked his unfinished VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE better.
Rating: 
Summary: If only philosophers would follow his lead today!
Review: As shown in his first book, The Structure of Behavior, and this extension of that piece, Merleau-Ponty was a philosopher who was way ahead of his time. While Husserl was off sputtering abstractly about phenomenology and 'essences', Merleau-Ponty planted himself squarely into the concrete, thick, world of lived experience: this book is a detailed phenomenological description of of attention, memory, space-perception, free will, and other psychological/phenomenological categories. M-P claims that simply by paying attention to this lifeworld, we see that previous philosophical systems have overlooked ineliminable dimensions of what it is like to be a person, and that this oversight has led to radically incomplete philosophical accounts of things like memory, perception, etc.. The book is so rich, original, and nuanced that it is hard to do it justice in a short review here. Not saddling himself with narrow academic techniques or fields, he draws on any resources he can to come to make sense of human experience. He cites not only philosophers such as Heidegger and Sarte, but draws equally heavily upon the Gestalt psychologists and neuroscientists of his day. He discusses phantom limbs, experiments on spatial perception, and psychophysical results from the Gestalt psychologists. Many ideas that are popular in modern analytic philosophy and psychology can be found in this book: the view that 'sense data' are simply theoretical constructs, the view that attention focuses on objects not abstract spatial locations, and the claim that our original concepts cannot be understood independently of the embodied interactions with the world where we first come to use them. I fear that Merleau-Ponty's nuanced philosophical psychology will fall through the cracks, being ignored by continental philosophers who focus on other things nowadays, and also by English speaking philosophers who dismiss Merleau-Ponty because he is a continental philosopher. If you consider yourself a philosopher of mind, epistemologist, or a continental philosopher, please read this book. Twice.
Rating:
Summary: A great work
Review: As someone with almost equally strong backgrounds in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy I can only applaud M-P's wide-ranging curiosity and knowledge and his refusal to be limited by the artificial boundaries of academic disciplines. His discussion of the phenomenology of perception draws its data and conclusions from many areas--as long as they had something to offer in illuminating and analyzing this important area. In this regard, I am reminded of the great but insufficiently appreciated philosopher, Samuel Alexander, in his major work, Space, Time, and Deity. Alexander was similarly eclectic, and moved back and forth between deduction, induction, historical argument, and between science and philosophy, without any sense of discontinuity whatever. In other words, he was willing to use whatever worked. But getting back to M-P, this book stands alone in it's thoroughgoing approach to the phenomenology of perception and in its determination to ground such analysis in the ordinary data of everyday life--much as G.E. Moore attempted to ground his metaphysics in very ordinary, everyday facts. M-P is to be commended for a similar approach and his work is probably the greatest of all of these.
Rating:
Summary: Counterpiece
Review: Originally, I read this book as part of a Philosophy of the Body course, in companion with Sartre's magnum opus, Being and Nothingness. Trying to keep the two thinkers separate was quite easy, because of the difference in approach and ideas that they both take. Sartre relies on a dualism and intellectualism not easily understood, resulting in a complex and amorphous work, which is still utterly powerful. M-P, however, as one review said, remains in the concrete experience of everyday life. Perception, the way the mind interprets the senses, the importance of memory, time, and freedom in the world, are all utterly important in this work. M-P provides a work which attempts to synthesize psychology, physicality, and philosophy resulting in a more holistic and foundational work than many 20th century philosophers. This book can be read as philosophy or psychology, in fact, any course on perception in a Psychology department should read it. Anyone wishing to discuss the question of Pontius Pilate ("What is truth?") should read this book. It touches on so many themes of intellectual life that it will become perhaps the most influential work of philosophy of the 20th century, vying with Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Heidegger's Being and Time.
Rating:
Summary: Counterpiece
Review: Originally, I read this book as part of a Philosophy of the Body course, in companion with Sartre's magnum opus, Being and Nothingness. Trying to keep the two thinkers separate was quite easy, because of the difference in approach and ideas that they both take. Sartre relies on a dualism and intellectualism not easily understood, resulting in a complex and amorphous work, which is still utterly powerful. M-P, however, as one review said, remains in the concrete experience of everyday life. Perception, the way the mind interprets the senses, the importance of memory, time, and freedom in the world, are all utterly important in this work. M-P provides a work which attempts to synthesize psychology, physicality, and philosophy resulting in a more holistic and foundational work than many 20th century philosophers. This book can be read as philosophy or psychology, in fact, any course on perception in a Psychology department should read it. Anyone wishing to discuss the question of Pontius Pilate ("What is truth?") should read this book. It touches on so many themes of intellectual life that it will become perhaps the most influential work of philosophy of the 20th century, vying with Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Heidegger's Being and Time.
Rating: 
Summary: I enjoyed this book
Review: Phenomenology of Perception is a feast of mind-candy, a motherlode of useful material to poke around in. I particularly enjoy Merleau-Ponty's meditation on the body and machinery, and how one can in a sense perceive space around objects with which one has a concern (as in driving a car); the machine effectively becomes part of one's subjectivity. Readers often gush about M-P's genius, so I'l spare you and simply suggest that it's worth the time to give this big beautiful book a spin.
The reader may wish to dig deeper into M-P's project. Right. David Michael Levin's 1980 article "Tarthang Tulku and Merleau-Ponty" provides a helpful running commentary on Phenomenology of Perception. Levin argues also that Tarthang Tulku's masterpiece, Time, Space, and Knowledge, pursues M-P's inquiry and method to their logical conclusions, and he finds those conclusions quite satisfactory. While much of Levin's article is a bit overwritten, his analysis is sound and his argument is well-founded, as one would expect from a M-P expert and philosopher of his caliber.
Rating:
Summary: A classic of phenomenology
Review: This early work of Merleau-Ponty is one of the great works of phenomenology. It is a tremendously rich book, and contains a great deal of thought not reproduced elsewhere in his writings. He takes phenomenology in a different direction from that of Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre, though he remains in dialogue with all three throughout. Late 20th century philosophy owes much to Merleau-Ponty, and this is a key work in understanding his thought. In my own opinion, it is one of the great books of philosophy, and the translation by Colin Smith is excellent. I highly recommend it, as you may have guessed.
Rating:
Summary: A classic of phenomenology
Review: This early work of Merleau-Ponty is one of the great works of phenomenology. It is a tremendously rich book, and contains a great deal of thought not reproduced elsewhere in his writings. He takes phenomenology in a different direction from that of Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre, though he remains in dialogue with all three throughout. Late 20th century philosophy owes much to Merleau-Ponty, and this is a key work in understanding his thought. In my own opinion, it is one of the great books of philosophy, and the translation by Colin Smith is excellent. I highly recommend it, as you may have guessed.
Rating:
Summary: The best phil. of mind book that no Anglophone ever reads.
Review: Well, not narrowly on the philosophy of mind; that'd be an analytic-biased description (and one that leaves out all the things such people may extraneous and annoying in this book). The field of philosophy of mind in Anglophone philosophy has all but ignored Merleau-Ponty's work, much to its disadvantage. Connectionism and dynamic systems theory as applied to the mental are seen as a "new" development, but the Gestalt psychologists and Merleau-Ponty had very much the same ideas long before. And a bunch of other ones, which to Anglophone ears may sound like they're from that other planet which lies across the Channel, but which deserve to be taken seriously. Warning: this book is HARD to read, all the more so because of cultural differences between analytic and continental philosophers. The translation is also not very good; if you can read French, go for the original. It helps to read other work ABOUT Merleau-Ponty; M.C. Dillon's "Merleau-Ponty's Ontology" is the best book I've found in this regard. Also, I think it's better to first read the following two things before tackling the book: (a) M-P's "The Primacy of Perception" (the lecture, collected in the book of the same name) for a shorter summary of his goals with the book; (b) the first chapter (and maybe the second, too) of his first book The Structure of Behavior, which discusses in great detail Merleau-Ponty's understanding of Gestalt Psychology (M-P actually refers the reader to this material repeatedly in the first few chapters of the Phenomenology of Perception).
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