World of Perception-轻识

'Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own.' In 1948, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote and delivered on French radio a series of seven lectures on the theme of perception. Translated here into English for the first time, they offer a lucid and concise insight into one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth-century. The lectures explore themes central not only to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy but to phenomenology as a whole. He begins by rejecting the idea - inherited from Descartes and influential within science - that perception is unreliable, prone to distort the world around us. Merleau-Ponty instead argues that perception is inseparable from our senses and it is how we make sense of the world. Merleau-Ponty explores this guiding theme through a brilliant series of reflections on science, space, our relationships with others, animal life and art. Throughout, he argues that perception is never something learned and then applied to the world. As creatures with embodied minds, he reminds us that we are born perceiving and share with other animals and infants a state of constant, raw, unpredictable contact with the world. He provides vivid examples with the help of Kafka, animal behaviour and above all modern art, particularly the work of Cezanne. A thought-provoking and crystalline exploration of consciousness and the senses, The World of Perception is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Merleau-Ponty, twentieth-century philosophy and art.

莫里斯·梅洛-庞蒂（Maurice Merleau-Ponty,1908—1961）,法国著名哲学家、思想家。梅洛-庞蒂极大地促进了胡塞尔及海德格尔所开创的现象学传统在法国的传播和发展。他对绘画艺术、文学等亦有精深独到的见解。1952年当选法兰西学院院士。1945年出版其代表性著作《知觉现象学》后，又陆续出版《人道主义和恐怖》、《意义与无意义》、《辩证法的历险》、《符号》等哲学著作，还有一些著述和讲稿在其去世后经整理出版，如《眼与心》、《可见的与不可见的》、《世界的散文》等。