His work is often associated with the idea of the ‘primacy of perception’, though rather than rejecting scientific and analytic ways of knowing the world, Merleau-Ponty simply wanted to argue that such knowledge is always derivative in relation to the more practical exigencies of the body’s exposure to the world. 2. Early Philosophy

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (born March 14, 1908, Rochefort, Fr.—died May 4, 1961, Paris) was a philosopher and man of letters, the leading exponent of Phenomenology in France. Merleau-Ponty studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and took his agrégation in philosophy in 1931.

On Merleau-Ponty’s presentation, the tensions of phenomenology’s method therefore reflect the nature of its task: The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoative style in which it proceeds are not the sign of failure, they were inevitable because phenomenology’s task was to reveal the mystery of the world and the mystery of reason.

Introduced to existentialism by Gabriel Marcel, familiar with the work of Edmund Husserl, gestalt theory, and the work of Max Weber, he published several important works of philosophy: The Structure of Behavior (1963), The Phenomenology of Perception (1962), and Adventures of the Dialectic (1973), a critique of a certain conception of Marxism.