Maurice Merleau-Ponty vs. William James
Side-by-side comparison of two thinkers
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
1908 – 1961
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.
"The function is to reduce all phenomena which bear witness to the union of subject and world, putting in their place the clear idea of the object as in itself a…"
William James
1842 – 1910
William James was an American philosopher and psychologist. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, he is considered to be one of the leading thinkers of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers and is often dubbed the "father of American psychology". A Review of General Psychology analysis, published in 2002, ranked James as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.
"Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the whole field of …"