Professor Thomas Baldwin discusses Merleau-Ponty on BBC's In Our Time
Professor Thomas Baldwin, Emeritus Professor within the Department of Philosophy, joins Melvyn Bragg on an episode of the BBC programme, In Our Time, to discuss the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961).
Merleau-Ponty, (1908-1961), was part of the movement known as phenomenology. While less well-known than his contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty's popularity has increased among philosophers in recent years. He rejected Rene Descartes’ division between body and mind, arguing that the way we perceive the world around us cannot be separated from our experience of inhabiting a physical body.
Merleau-Ponty was interested in the down-to-earth question of what it is actually like to live in the world. While performing actions as simple as brushing our teeth or patting a dog, we shape the world and, in turn, the world shapes us.