Merleau-Ponty Book

This is a brilliant introduction to the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty; accessible to the beginning student, it assumes no previous knowledge of philosophy, yet it still treats the matter at hand in deep, thoughtful ways that will provoke any philosophy student.

Some key point:

Perception
For the empiricist, perception is indirect, broken down and analyzed in different components, and passive; for Merleau-Ponty, perception is "participatory"--the thing I am perceiving interacts with me as I perceive. To perceive is always be to situated, and to be situated is always to be embodied: to be physically present in a place, a physical instantiation of "consciousness".

Traditional Scientific Frameworks
What is wrong with them is that they take for granted the scientific view of the world. In the framework of Science, we become "objective" by "transcending" our physical bodies. We assume, in other words, it does not matter that we are embodied beings. But, for Merleau-Ponty, we are primarily and foremost embodied beings, so to just assume this as part of the unimportant "background noise" is unacceptable.

Behavior
Science looks for cause and effect relationships; but experience is a matter of a priori intentional structures. By Intentional, Husserl (who borrowed the term from Brentano and adopted it as the main tenet of phenomenology) meant that consciousness is always directed at something, it is never just unbounded consciousness. Behavior is intentional in this sense (and not simply a causal matter), writes M-P. For example, we might be able to explain causally why our body moves the way it does when we are going somewhere, but we will not, within this inquiry, understand why we are going where we are going, why our bodies are going faster rather than slower, why we are panting in excitement and so forth. For us to understand these structures of experience, we must bracket our preconceptions and, through phenomenological inquiry, try and get back to "the things themselves".

Brilliant and easy-to-read book by a life-long philosopher interested in Merleau-Ponty and embodiment. Highly Recommended!!!