The greatest phenomenologist in France

Merleau-Ponty was born in March 1908 to a Catholic family on the west coast of France.

He lost his father at an early age and entered the École Normale Supérieure in Paris at the age of 18 to study philosophy.

In college, he was heavily influenced by the French philosopher Bergson.

In 1929, Merleau-Ponty listened to Husserl's famous lectures, after which Husserl philosophy had an important influence on Merleau-Ponty.

It can be said that Husserl's later ideas constituted the starting point of Merleau-Ponty phenomenology.

During World War II, Merleau-Ponty enlisted in the Resistance and returned to Paris to teach after retiring.

In 1942, his first book, The Structure of Behavior, was published, and in 1945 his Phenomenology of Perception was published.

He then founded Modern magazine with Sartre, De Beauvoir, and others, but due to political differences, he and Sartre parted ways.

In 1952, Merleau-Ponty took up the position of Professor of Philosophy at the Collège de France, and on 15 January 1953 he delivered his inaugural speech, "Philosophical Praises".

In 1961, at the age of 53, Merleau-Ponty died suddenly of a stroke.

Although he remained in the world for only 53 years, his ideas were profoundly influential, and he was called "the most creative French phenomenologist", and his book Phenomenology of Perception, together with Sartre's Existence and Nothingness, is regarded as the foundation of the French phenomenological movement.

Merleau-Ponty has a book called Phenomenology of Perception. "Perception" is a central concept in his philosophy, arguing that perception is the absolute knowledge of a philosopher. It is the book published in 1945.

The mechanophysiological perspective emphasizes the objectivity of perception.

The subjectivist perspective emphasizes the subjectivity of perception.

Merleau-Ponty takes the perspective of subject-guest identity to illustrate perception.

He believes that perception is a very vague experience of existence between subject and object, a kind of existential experience when the subject and the object have not yet been differentiated and artificial consciousness, that is, when the subject and object first blend together. The popular understanding is that before you realize that "this is a tree," your first experience of contact with the tree is perception.