The World Perceived

'In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principle themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science – and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger.' - James Elkins Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the most important thinkers of the post-war era. Central to his thought was the idea that human understanding comes from our bodily experience of the world that we perceive: a deceptively simple argument, perhaps, but one that he felt had to be made in the wake of attacks from contemporary science and the philosophy of Descartes on the reliability of human perception. From this starting point, Merleau-Ponty presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception to French radio listeners in 1948. Available in a paperback English translation for the first time in the Routledge Classics series to mark the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth, this is a dazzling and accessible guide to a whole universe of experience, from the pursuit of scientific knowledge, through the psychic life of animals to the glories of the art of Paul Cézanne.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is probably the most divisive philosopher of the twentieth century. Considered by some to be the greatest charlatan ever to claim the title of 'philosopher', by some as an apologist for Nazism, he was also an acknowledged leader and central figure to many philosophers. Michael Inwood's lucid introduction to Heidegger's thought focuses on his most important work, 'Being and Time', and its major themes of existence in the world, inauthenticity, guilt, destiny, truth, and the nature of time. These themes are then reassessed in the light of Heidegger's later work, together with the extent of his philosophical importance and influence. This is an invaluable guide to the complex and voluminous thought of a major twentieth-century existentialist philosopher. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Stanley Cavell looks closely at America's most popular art and our perceptions of it. His explorations of Hollywood's stars, directors, and most famous films—as well as his fresh look at Godard, Bergman, and other great European directors—will be of lasting interest to movie-viewers and intelligent people everywhere.

How are we to make sense of the Bible in the context of the modern world? In this book, you will discover a new way of perceiving the world; a way in which the biblical view of the world can be seen as just as true-for-us as the modern scientific view of the world. The World Perceived explores how we think about the world, how we perceive the world, and how we choose to live our lives in-the-world. Using phenomenology as a philosophical framework for the construction of a biblical theology of appearances, the author illustrates how the biblical description of reality is of far greater relevance to us than are the descriptions of reality given to us by modern science and popular science writers. By exploring the epistemological bases of both science and theology as a forms of knowledge along with the assumptions implicit within both worldviews, The World Perceived invites the reader upon an intellectual journey into the world of phenomenal reality. The author makes a strong case for the validity of the biblical description of the world and reality by demonstrating how the modern scientific description of the world and reality are in no way superior to the biblical description. Using three examples of conflicting scientific and biblical descriptions of the world (i.e., the geocentric versus the heliocentric conception of the universe, creation versus evolution, and absolute time versus relative time) The World Perceived demonstrates the Bible's relevancy to the modern world, which is often hostile to both religion and the Bible, like no other book on the market today.

The perception of Europeans of the world and of the peoples beyond Europe has become in recent years the subject of intense scholarly interest and heated debate both in and outside the academy. So, too, has the concern with how it was that those peoples who were variously ’discovered’, and then, as often as not, colonised, understood the strangers in their midst. This volume attempts to cover both these topics, as well as to provide a number of crucial articles on the difficulties faced by modern historians in understanding the complex, relationship between ’them’ and ’us’. Inevitably such relationships not only changed over time, they also varied greatly from culture to culture. The articles, therefore cover most of the areas with which the European world came into contact from the earliest Portuguese incursions into Africa in the mid fifteenth century until the explorations of Cook and Bougainville in the Pacific in the late eighteenth. It ranges, too, from Brazil to Russia, from Tahiti to China.

First published in 1961, Perception and the Physical World contends that there are insuperable difficulties for the Representative and Phenomenalist theories. Unreflective common sense thinks of sense-perception as a direct grasping of the nature of the physical world. But when we are confronted with facts about sensory illusion, about the physical and physiological causes of perception, and with modern scientific views of the real nature of matter, it is hard to maintain such a Direct Realist' theory of perception. We tend to substitute a Copy or Representative theory which puts sense-impressions between ourselves and physical reality. Some philosophers overwhelmed by the difficulties of the Copy theory, retreat into Phenomenalism, which identifies the physical world with our sense-impressions. The author re-examines all the traditional objections to a Direct Realist theory and tries to show that they can be overcome. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy.

This edited volume constructs a ‘cosmopolitics’ of climate change, consulting small-scale sustainable communities on whether the world is ending and why, and how we can take action to prevent it. By comparing scientific and indigenous accounts of the same phenomenon, contributors seek to broaden Western understandings of what climate change constitutes. In this context, existing cosmologies are challenged, opening spaces for hegemonic narratives to enter into conversation with the non-modern and construct ‘worlds otherwise’—situations of world change and renewal through climate change. Bold brings together perspectives from Central America, Mexico, the Amazon, and the Andes to converse with scientific narratives of climate change and create cracks that bring new worlds into being for readers.

Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception. For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patters) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate." How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth? In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.