Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language - Paperback

by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Author), Hugh J. Silverman (Translator)

The tools, concepts, and vocabulary of phenomenology are used in this book to explore language in a multitude of contexts.

Back Jacket

The lecture notes taken down by students were periodically gathered together and submitted to Merleau-Ponty for his approval. Then every two or three weeks these notes were published in the Bulletin du Groupe d'etudes de psychologie de l'Universite de Paris. By the end of the year, one would have the full set of lectures as transcribed by students and as reviewed by Merleau-Ponty.

Author Biography

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1908-1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre (who later stated he had been "converted" to Marxism by Merleau-Ponty ) and Simone de Beauvoir. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. Like the other major phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty expressed his philosophical insights in writings on art, literature, linguistics, and politics. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences and especially with descriptive psychology.