This is philosophy bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds.

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Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camu achieved celebrity well beyond France and well beyond philosophy.

They had a friend Maurice Melo Ponti who was much less famous, A leading exponent of phenomenology, the study of how things appear to us,

the way we are in the world and experience it, Merleau-Ponty argued that knowledge comes

through the body.

Catherine Morris from Oxford University believes Merleau-Ponty deserves wider recognition.

Catherine Morris, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you.

The topic we're going to focus on is Merleau-Ponty and the body.

Just to begin, who was Merleau-Ponty?

Merleau-Ponty was a 20th century philosopher, a friend and a colleague of Jean Paul Sartre and

Simone de Beauvoir, and he lectured partly in philosophy.

One of the things that's kind of interesting about him

was that he engaged very much with the human sciences,

anthropology, sociology, and especially psychology.

He died terribly young in his early 50s, but when he died

he held the chair in childhood psychology and pedagogy, which he took over from Pioje, you may have heard of.

Meloponte was a phenomenologist, difficult word to say, but what does it mean?

Phenology is a very broad way of doing philosophy, kind of devised by Edmund Husserl,

...