Written between 1945 and 1947, the essays in Sense and Non-Sense provide an excellent introduction to Merleau-Ponty's thought. They summarize his previous insights and exhibit their widest range of application-in aesthetics, ethics, politics, and the sciences of man. Each essay opens new perspectives to man's search for reason.
The first part of Sense and Non-Sense, "Arts," is concerned with Merleau-Ponty's concepts of perception, which were advanced in his major philosophical treatise, Phenomenology of Perception. Here the analysis is focused and enriched in...

""Speech is a way of tearing out a meaning from an undivided whole.""
Thus does Maurice Merleau-Ponty describe speech in this collection of his important writings on the philosophy of expression, composed during the last decade of his life. For him, expression is a category of human behavior and existence much broader than language alone. He maintains that man is essentially expressive, even prior to speaking: in his silence, gestures, and lived behavior.

The lecture notes taken down by students were periodically gathered together and submitted to Merleau-Ponty for his approval. Then every two or three weeks these notes were published in the Bulletin du Groupe d'etudes de psychologie de l'Universite de Paris. By the end of the year, one would have the full set of lectures as transcribed by students and as reviewed by Merleau-Ponty.

The work that Maurice Merleau-Ponty planned to call "The Prose of the World, " or "Introduction to the Prose of the World, " was unfinished at the time of his death. The book was to constitute the first section of a two-part work whose aim was to offer, as an extension of his Phenomenology of Perception, a theory of truth. This edition's editor, Claude Lefort, has interpreted and transcribed the surviving typescript, reproducing Merleau-Ponty's own notes and adding documentation and commentary.