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'''Maurice Merleau-Ponty''' (March 14, 1908 – May 4, 1961) was a [[France|French]] [[phenomenology|phenomenologist]] philosopher, strongly influenced by [[Edmund Husserl]], and often somewhat mistakenly classified as an [[existentialism|existentialist]] thinker because of his close association with [[Jean-Paul Sartre]] and [[Simone de Beauvoir]], and his distinctly [[Heidegger]]ian conception of Being.
==Dictionary==
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher, was born on March 14, 1908, in Rochefort-sur-Mer and died on May 3, 1961, in Paris. A graduate of theÉcole Normale Supérieure, he held a degree in philosophy and a PhD in literature. He taught in the literature department of the University of Lyon, then at the Sorbonne, and he succeeded Louis Lavelle at the Collège de France in 1952. Introduced to existentialism by Gabriel Marcel, familiar with the work of Edmund Husserl, gestalt theory, and the work of Max Weber, he published several important works of philosophy: <i>The Structure of Behavior</i> (1963), <i>The Phenomenology of Perception</i> (1962), and <i>Adventures of the Dialectic</i> (1973), a critique of a certain conception of Marxism. He also left behind the unfinished manuscript <i>The Visible and the Invisible</i> (1968), which pointed to a fundamental reorientation in his thinking. Merleau-Ponty occasionally attended Jacques Lacan's seminar and was present at the Journées de Bonneval conference on the unconscious in 1960.
