The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953 (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

The Sensible World and the World of Expression was a course of lectures that Merleau-Ponty gave at the Collge de France after his election to the chair of philosophy in 1952. The publication and translation of Merleau-Pontys notes from this course provide an exceptional view into the evolution of his thought at an important point in his career. In these notes, we see that Merleau-Pontys consideration of the problem of the perception of movement leads him to make a self-critical return to Phenomenology of Perception in order to rethink the perceptual encounter with the sensible world as essentially expressive, and hence to revise his understanding of the body schema accordingly in terms of praxical motor possibilities. Sketching out an embodied dialectic of expressive praxis that would link perception with art, language, and other cultural and intersubjective phenomena, up to and including truth, Merleau-Pontys notes for these lectures thus afford an exciting glimpse of how he aspired to overcome the impasse of ontological dualism. Situated midway between Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible , these notes mark a juncture of crucial importance with regard to Merleau-Pontys later efforts to work out the ontological underpinnings of phenomenology in terms of a new dialectical conception of nature and history. The Sensible World and the World of Expression was a course of lectures that Merleau-Ponty gave at the College de France in 1952. The publication and translation of Merleau-Ponty's notes from this course provide an exceptional view into the evolution of his thought at an important point in his career. "The Sensible World and the World of Expression presents the lecture notes for a course taught by Maurice Marleau-Ponty, a central figure of phenomenological philosophy, at a key point in his career"-- Provided by publisher