MERLEAU-PONTY, MAURICE

French phenomenologist, professor of philosophy at the Collège de France; b. Rochefort-sur-mer (Charente-Maritime), March 14, 1908; d. Paris, May 3, 1961. Of Catholic origin, Merleau-Ponty was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in 1926. After receiving his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1945, he taught at the University of Lyons and the Sorbonne (1949–52) until his nomination to the Collège de France. Although not a philosophical theist, Merleau-Ponty requested and received a religious burial service, an indication that he remained open on the question of personal religious belief. Situated within the movement most accurately designated as existential phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty's thought manifests affinities with the work of J. P. Sartre, M. Heidegger, and G. Marcel (see existentialism). E. husserl, especially of the late period, remains the principal philosophical influence; G. W. F. hegel was a significant but less dominant source. Committed to phenomenology as the philosophical method that would permit surpassing the subject-object, idealism-realism dichotomy of modern philosophy, Merleau-Ponty developed and transformed the phenomenology of Husserl into a more concrete and realistic philosophy. His major works consist of (1) detailed critical analyses of the sciences of man as well as of the classical modern rationalist philosophers and (2) an elucidation of the basic structures of human existence based upon man's immediate experience of the world, others, and himself. Later works develop his thought in the areas of aesthetics, political philosophy, and philosophy of history.

Bibliography: Works. The Structure of Behavior, tr. a. l. fisher (Boston 1963); The Phenomenology of Perception, tr. c. smith (New York 1962); Humanisme et terreur (Paris 1947); In Praise of Philosophy, tr. j. wild and j. m. edie (Evanston, Ill. 1963); Les Aventures de la dialectique (Paris 1955); Signs, tr. r. c. mccleary (Evanston 1964); Sense and Non-Sense, tr. H. L. and p. a. dreyfus (Evanston 1964); The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, ed. j. m. edie (Evanston 1964). Literature. a. de waelhens, Une Philosophie de l'ambiguïté: L'Existentialisme de Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Louvain 1951). a. dondeyne, Contemporary European Thought and Christian Faith, tr. e. mcmullin and j. burnheim (Pittsburgh 1958). h. spiecelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 2 v. (The Hague 1960).

[a. l. fisher]