Maurice Merleau-Ponty
1908–1961 · Phenomenology · Prominent
Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenologist, a philosopher of how experience shows up from the inside, and his subject was the lived body. You never meet your own body as an object under inspection. You perceive through it, and that happens before any thought about it. He put this at the centre of Phenomenology of Perception in 1945, arguing against empiricism and intellectualism alike. His late work treats ambiguity as built into the world.
Signature
The position Merleau-Ponty is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain
- Perception
- Embodied Perception
Positions on the 1 axes the sources answer
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain (85 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
19 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Merleau-Ponty refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Government
- Parliamentary System
What is your ideal form of government? - Perception
- Embodied Perception
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Embodied Cognition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Time
- Phenomenological Time
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Language
- Expression
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Paradox
- Productive Tension
What is the status of paradox?