Blackwell Reference Online

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Merleau-Ponty, French philosopher of the period immediately following World War II, is best-known in epistemology for his analyses of perceptual experience and of the interplay between perception and action, between perception of self and the perception of others, and between perceptual life, taken as a whole, and its various expressions and transformations in language, reflective thought, art, science, and philosophy. Merleau-Ponty's theory of knowledge begins with a rejection of “the problem of knowledge” in what he takes to be the Cartesian sense. We do not have to respond to radical scepticism; we do not have to seek conclusive reasons to justify an inference beyond perception to knowledge of an “external” world. To think that we do is to demand an inappropriate sort of certainty in perception and to assume an unwarranted dichotomy between perception and world. Merleau-Ponty contends that perception is, in its own way, intrinsically cognitive. “We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive” (1962, p. xvi). Not, of course, if “perceive” is understood as the reception of sensory data or some form of explicit judgement based on sense-data; instead, we must understand perception to be the way in which humans are already, in Heidegger's phrase, “in the world”. Perception is precisely our “access” to the world. ... log in or subscribe to read full text