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Original French edition collected and edited by Jean Deprun
English translation by Paul B. Milan edited by Patrick Burke
Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences Series
Series Editors: Hugh J. Silverman, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Graeme Nicholson, Trinity College, University of Toronto
This volume is the English translation of sixteen lectures by Maurice Merleau-Ponty given at the +cole Normale SupTrieure in 1947-48 and reconstituted on the basis of notes taken by some of his most outstanding students. Devoted to three of the great names in the French philosophical tradition, Malebranche, Maine de Biran, and Bergson, these lectures center on a classic problem: the union of the soul and the body. They reveal a line of reasoning that Merleau-Ponty had already traced in The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, and anticipate later developments of his innovative philosophical inquiry in Signs and The Visible and the Invisible.
In these lectures Merleau-Ponty demonstrates how Malebranche had articulated an early phenomenology of the human condition, how Maine de Biran had anticipated the central project and related themes of the Phenomenology of Perception, and how certain features of BergsonÆs method announce key elements of the philosophical methodology expressed in Merleau-PontyÆs later works. This volume contains one of Merleau-PontyÆs most sustained explications and critiques of BergsonÆs Matter and Memory, and, more important, his only major presentation and critique of the thought of Maine de Biran.
The serious student of Merleau-Ponty and of the history of philosophy will find this unique volume of a hitherto-untranslated work of great value.
Paul B. Milan (Seattle, WA) is associate professor of French and
Patrick Burke (Seattle, WA) is professor of philosophy at Seattle University.