SOURCE: Edie, James M. “The Significance of Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Language.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 13, no. 3 (July 1975): 385-98.

In the following essay, Edie examines the continuing significance of Merleau-Ponty's unfinished philosophical system.

It is now more than fourteen years since we first heard of the untimely death of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. To me, and I am sure to many others, it seems much longer. Merleau-Ponty has already entered the history of philosophy. Though his Nachlass is still being published, and not all of his writings have yet appeared in English translation, philosophers of our generation had already enshrined his major work, the Phenomenology of Perception, as a “classic” even before his death. But unlike many other “classical” philosophers, Merleau-Ponty's work impresses us by its unfinished, open-ended, still-to-be-completed character. Unlike a Spinoza or an Aquinas, or even a Husserl (“the perpetual beginner”), he left his major philosophical task...