Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus–his equivalent to Being & Nothinginess or Being & Time–is The Phenomenology of Perception. It is reputed (by Seth, at least) to complete Heidegger’s project by paying proper attention to our embodiedness: we have bodies, with specific perceptual limitations and are not only culturally but physically situated in ways that (as Heidegger insisted) make Cartesian doubt a sham. Scientism is a mistake, and in particular attempts to explain consciousness without allowing first person reports (i.e. by strictly applying the scientific method) will be hopeless, because all inquiry starts with, is founded on, and presupposes this situation of us already in the world, with other people, with all these layers of meaning packing up our conscious experiences and even our unthinking behavior, to be elaborated by phenomenology.

So the Phenomenology of Perception is a very fat book that purports to give an existential phenomenology, from an analysis of perception (attention, judgment, “the phenomenal field”), to the various aspects of having a body (its spatiality, sexuality, expression, and how mechanistic psychology and classical psychology teat it), to a consequent analysis of time and freedom. …All stated with much less of the horrific made-up terminology of Heidegger or B&T-era Satre than you’d expect.

However, that book is much too long, and takes a long time to get around to saying much, so instead, we chose to read a sort of presentation of that work to a lay audience.World of Perception,from 1948, is actually a series of radio lectures for a general audience, presenting on broad strokes what the viewpoint of the kind of philosophy he represents has to add the popular view of science.

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