Perceived World

This text, surprising in its topicality, consists of Merleau-Ponty's radio talks from 1948. It achieves an unexpected success despite its brevity: many fervent philosophical debates that have taken place over the past sixty years are foreshadowed here in an extremely clear and fluid language: the relationship between science and other forms of knowing; the parallel between modern painting, which abandons the "divine" perspective focused on eternity and pursues more modest, more "human" ways of seeing, and the latest developments in science; the failure of the Cartesian dualistic scientific model that conceives of man as a disembodied mind, alongside the discovery of man as having a body intimately connected with objects, and an imagination capable of showing the honesty to confront his animality, childhood, madness, and primitiveness...

Merleau-Ponty is a philosopher who, against the hegemony of rationalism, tries to give due credit to "all elements of human experience," especially "perception," our senses, and our body, which have always been considered deceptive and secondary. We hope that this beautiful book, which illustrates how closely we are connected to the natural and cultural world through perception, will be read with pleasure by readers interested in art, seeing, and phenomenology, as well as by those who consider philosophy and the political sphere together. Because we are faced with a philosopher who says: "Let's not boast anymore about being a community of pure minds; let's see what the relationships we establish with each other in our societies truly are: mostly master-slave relationships."