Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908—61) French philosopher. A key proponent of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty is one of the most important commentators on the work of Husserl, Edmund. He was also one of the first to recognize the significance of the work of Swiss linguist Saussure, Ferdinand de and is considered by many to have provided the link from phenomenology to structuralism. Undoubtedly, though, Merleau-Ponty is most widely known as a philosopher of the body. Born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, he grew up in the Charente-Maritime region, but studied in Paris, first at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly and then, following a familiar pathway, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École Normale Supérieure (ANT), where his classmates included Beauvoir, Simone de and Jean-Paul Sartre. He completed his studies at the ENS in 1930 and then along with Beauvoir and Lévi-Strauss, Claude began his teacher training at his alma mater the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly. He was invited back to the ENS in 1935 to take up a position as tutor and remained there until the outbreak of World War II in 1939. During these years he developed his ideas on perception in preparation for his Doctorat ès Lettres. He also attended the lectures of Kojève, Alexandre. During the war, Merleau-Ponty served briefly in the infantry and then following France’s surrender he took an active role in the Resistance. After the war, Merleau-Ponty’s career really took off. Having already submitted his minor thesis, La Structure du comportement (The Structure of Behaviour), in 1938 (it was published in 1942), he was finally able to submit his major thesis, Phénoménologie de la perception (1945), translated as Phenomenology of Perception (1962). On the strength of this he was offered a Chair in Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the Sorbonne. Part of his research for this project was done at the Husserl archive in Belgium---he was the first French scholar to visit, he was also instrumental in establishing a Paris-based Husserl archive as well. In 1946, together with Sartre and Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty founded the journal, Les Temps Modernes, serving as its political affairs editor until 1952, when he resigned over disagreements with the editorial board concerning their support for North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. In the same year he was elevated to a Chair in Philosophy at the Collège de France, the youngest ever appointment. Merleau-Ponty’s lifelong project was to explain the lived world. He rejected purely scientific explanations as overly simplified, pointing out that in their attempt to present realist explanations they rely on idealist models. Merleau-Ponty rejected virtually all dualisms, particularly those which separated the mind into parts such as Freud, Sigmund’s distinction between conscious and unconscious and those which separated subjects from objects. Merleau-Ponty thought rather in terms of continuums of existence, hence his concepts of flesh (chair) and chiasm, which try to explain the interlocking of the differentiated but not isolated components of existence. In this latter respect he was clearly influenced by Bergson, Henri. Merleau-Ponty died suddenly and unexpectedly and left behind a large corpus of unfinished material. Thanks to the efforts of diligent editors, two unfinished books, Le Visible et l’invisible (1964), translated as The Visible and the Invisible (1968) and La Prose du monde (1969), translated as The Prose of the World (1973), have since been published, as have a selection of his lectures from the Collège de France. Further Reading: T. Baldwin Reading Merleau-Ponty (2007). T. Carman Merleau-Ponty (2008). T. Carman and M. Hansen (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (2004). L. Hass Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy (2008).