Merleau-Ponty, Maurice(1908–1961)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher associated with existential phenomenology, was the youngest philosopher ever to be appointed to the chair once occupied by Henri Bergson at the Collège de France. Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer on March 14, 1908. His father died early in his childhood; he and his brother and sister were raised by his mother. He attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and then the École Normale Supérieure earning his aggregation in 1930. He taught in lycées and then was mobilized in the Fifth Infantry Regiment, and served as a second lieutenant from 1939 until demobilization in 1940. During the occupation he participated in the Résistance. After the liberation in 1945 he taught at the Université de Lyon; during this time he, together with Jean-Paul Sartre, founded the avant-garde journal, Les temps modernes. In was also in 1945 that his major work, the Phenomenology of Perception was published.
Merleau-Ponty is known primarily for developing an ontology that recognizes the philosophical significance of the human body and for his success in overcoming the dualism that has plagued European philosophy from its inception, but these endeavors also include significant contributions to post-structuralist linguistics, political theory, developmental psychology, and aesthetics. His early interest in the resonance between the emergent school of gestalt psychology and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger led to a radical reassessment of transcendental philosophy.
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