Dr. Douglas Low

This volume presents the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a great philosopher and social theorist of mid-twentieth century, as a viable alternative to both modernism and postmodernism. Douglas Low argues that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy offers explanations and solves problems that other philosophies grapple with, but do not resolve, given their respective theoretical presuppositions and assumptions. Low brings the work of Merleau-Ponty into critical contact with important thinkers, including Sartre, Heidegger, Derrida, and Marx. He highlights Merleau-Ponty's connection to the early Hegel, especially with regard to the criticism of modernism's "representational consciousness" and its subsequent skepticism with regard to our being in the world. Merleau-Ponty made a concerted effort to solve the problems that come about due to a wide variety of Western dualisms: body and mind, perception and conception, self and other, etc. He frequently does so by demonstrating the connection between these disparate terms, the connection of perception with affect and interest, fact with value, and a broadened view of science with moral and philosophical judgment. Merleau-Ponty's unique contribution is his focus on the lived-through perceiving body and its relationship to abstract thought and language. In his detailed analysis of the work of Merleau-Ponty, Low brings attention to a twentieth-century master capable of altering the landscape of modern and social philosophy in the twenty-first century.

Few writers' unfinished works are considered among their most important, but such is the case with Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. What exists of it is a mere beginning, yet it bridged modernism and postmodernism in philosophy. Low uses material from some of Merleau-Ponty's later works as the basis for completion. Working from this material and the philosopher's own outline, Low presents how this important work would have looked had Merleau-Ponty lived to complete it.

The Existential Dialectic of Marx and Merleau-Ponty is one of the few books to offer an in depth epistemological study linking the works of Karl Marx with a major existentialist thinker. The author first documents the existential and dialectical themes that can be found in Marx's writings and then proceeds to show that Marx's method is strikingly similar to that employed by Merleau-Ponty. It is Merleau-Ponty, however, who has developed this method in detail. Dr. Low thus turns to a thorough analysis and exposition of Merleau-Ponty's first major work, The Structure of Behavior, to reveal Merleau-Ponty's innovative and well-balanced alternative to traditional empiricism and rationalism. Merleau-Ponty's method, as it is revealed here, will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists and social scientists concerned with freeing themselves from the limitations imposed by traditional methodologies.