Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Few writers' unfinished works are considered among their most important, but such is the case with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. What exists of it is a mere beginning, published posthumously, yet it bridged modernism and postmodernism in philosophy.Merleau-Ponty is among the best of the "first generation" of French phenomenologists. His untimely death in 1961 left The Visible and the Invisible in a fragmentary state that exacerbates the text's difficulty and complexity. Low uses material from some of Merleau-Ponty's later works -- specifically, essays from 1952 onward and published lecture summaries from the College de France -- to provide the basis for completion. Working from this material and an outline of the book left by Merleau-Ponty, Low has written an account of how The Visible and the Invisible would have looked had Merleau-Ponty lived to complete it.
Low shows a thorough mastery of the material and clarifies many difficult issues. Rather than presenting an argument, he offers an integration and extrapolation that go far beyond mere summary of the material: this distinguished scholar provides commentary on a work that was never finished, on various texts that were never published together, and on some that were never intended for publication.
Synopsis
Few writers' unfinished works are considered among their most important, but such is the case with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. What exists of it is a mere beginning, published posthumously, yet it bridged modernism and postmodernism in philosophy.
Merleau-Ponty is among the best of the "first generation" of French phenomenologists. His untimely death in 1961 left The Visible and the Invisible in a fragmentary state that exacerbates the text's difficulty and complexity. Low uses material from some of Merleau-Ponty's later works -- specifically, essays from 1952 onward and published lecture summaries from the College de France -- to provide the basis for completion. Working from this material and an outline of the book left by Merleau-Ponty, Low has written an account of how The Visible and the Invisible would have looked had Merleau-Ponty lived to complete it.
Low shows a thorough mastery of the material and clarifies many difficult issues. Rather than presenting an argument, he offers an integration and extrapolation that go far beyond mere summary of the material: this distinguished scholar provides commentary on a work that was never finished, on various texts that were never published together, and on some that were never intended for publication.