Philosophers and artists consider the relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for understanding art and aesthetic experience. This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher’s writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining.

This book poses the question of what lies at the limit of philosophy. Through close studies of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's life and work, the authors examine one of the twentieth century's most interdisciplinary philosophers whose thought intersected with and contributed to the practices of art, psychology, literature, faith and philosophy. As these essays show, Merleau-Ponty's oeuvre disrupts traditional disciplinary boundaries and prompts his readers to ask what, exactly, constitutes philosophy and its others. Featuring essays by an international team of leading phenomenologists, art theorists, theologians, historians of philosophy, and philosophers of mind, this volume breaks new ground in Merleau-Ponty scholarship-including the first sustained reflections on the relationship between Merleau-Ponty and religion-and magnifies a voice that is talked-over in too many conversations across the academic disciplines. Anyone interested in phenomenology, art theory and history, cognitive science, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of religion will find themselves challenged and engaged by the articles included in this important effort at inter-disciplinary philosophy.

'In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principle themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science – and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger.' - James Elkins Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the most important thinkers of the post-war era. Central to his thought was the idea that human understanding comes from our bodily experience of the world that we perceive: a deceptively simple argument, perhaps, but one that he felt had to be made in the wake of attacks from contemporary science and the philosophy of Descartes on the reliability of human perception. From this starting point, Merleau-Ponty presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception to French radio listeners in 1948. Available in a paperback English translation for the first time in the Routledge Classics series to mark the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth, this is a dazzling and accessible guide to a whole universe of experience, from the pursuit of scientific knowledge, through the psychic life of animals to the glories of the art of Paul Cézanne.

Selected essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty published from 1947 to 1961.

Philosophers and artists consider the relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for understanding art and aesthetic experience. This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher’s writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining. Duane H. Davis is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and the editor of Merleau-Ponty’s Later Works and Their Practical Implications: The Dehiscence of Responsibility. William S. Hamrick is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He is the coauthor (with Jan Van der Veken) of Nature and Logos: A Whiteheadian Key to Merleau-Ponty’s Fundamental Thought; author of Kindness and the Good Society: Connections of the Heart; and the coeditor (with Suzanne L. Cataldi) of Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought, all published by SUNY Press.

Buddhist philosophy of Anicca (impermanence), Dukkha (suffering), and

Since the latter half of the 20th century, committed art has been associated with conceptual, critical and activist practices. Painting, by contrast, is all too often defined as an outmoded, reactionary, market-led venture; an ineffectual medium from the perspective of social and political engagement. How can paintings change the world today? The question of painting, in particular, fuelled the investigations of a major 20th-century philosopher: the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907-61). Merleau-Ponty was at the forefront of attempts to place philosophy on a new footing by contravening the authority of Cartesian dualism and objectivist thought-an authority that continues to limit present-day intellectual, imaginative, and ethical possibilities. A central aim of The Question of Painting is to provide a closely focused, chronological account of his unfolding project and its relationship with art, clarifying how painting, as a paradigmatically embodied and situated mode of investigation, helped him to access the fundamentally “intercorporeal” basis of reality as he saw it, and articulate its lived implications. With an exclusive and extended conversation about the contemporary virtues of painting with New York based artist Leah Durner, for whom the work of Merleau-Ponty is an important source of inspiration, The Question of Painting brings today's much debated concerns about the criticality of painting into contact with the question of painting in philosophy.