Merleau-Ponty has long been known as one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics, yet most discussions of his aesthetics focus on visual art. This book corrects that balance by turning to Merleau-Ponty's extensive engagement with literature.
Exploring the concept of beauty through Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics, this study by Galen Johnson delves into the philosophical underpinnings that inform our understanding of the beautiful. By analyzing Merleau-Ponty's work, Johnson reveals how his philosophical insights, though not explicitly focused on beauty, fundamentally relate to the aesthetic experience. This elegant examination offers a fresh perspective on the intersection of philosophy and aesthetics, highlighting the significance of beauty in human perception and understanding.
Leading Merleau-Ponty scholars state and interpret the philosopher's later ontology of flesh and reversibility, some defending and some challenging its accommodation of alterity and difference. Claude Lefort's seminal lecture criticizing Merleau-Ponty's treatment of otherness in The Visible and the Invisible and two previously untranslated essays by Emmanual Levinas shape this dialogue.
This book is a philosophical inquiry into historical meaning and narrative understanding. Interpreting selected writings of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and stories of Kafka, Rilke, Sartre, and Camus, the author defends the narrative coherence of life and the irreducibility of narrative understanding and truth. The island imagery uncovered in these authors provides the parameters for a contemporary philosophy of history properly mingling earth and sky as natality and mortality, remembering and forgetting, wandering and homecoming, waking and dreaming, wealth and poverty. Johnson has pushed the life-world theme of Husserl's phenomenology out toward the wild-flowering world where it seems to have been headed.