The Thinking of the Sensible

In this first English publication of a well-known and widely respected Italian scholar, readers will encounter the preeminent interpreter of the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty engaged in a dialogue of critical concern to contemporary philosophy. In subtle and sensitive language eminently suitable to the style and substance of Merleau-Ponty's own writings, Mauro Carbone fashions four essays around a theme - the relations of the sensible and the intelligible, and of philosophy and non-philosophy - that occupied Merleau-Ponty in his later work. An original and innovative interpretation of the ontology of Merleau-Ponty - and themselves a significant contribution to the field of Continental thought - these essays constitute a sustained exploration of what Merleau-Ponty detected, and greeted, as a ""mutation within the relations of man and Being,"" which would provide him with a basis for a new idea of philosophy or ""a-philosophy"". Carbone analyses key elements of Merleau-Ponty's thought in relation to Proust's ""Recherche"", Hegel's ""Phenomenology of Spirit"", the new biology of Von Uexkull, Rimbaud's ""Lettre du voyant"", and Heidegger's conception of ""letting-be"". His work clearly demonstrates the vitality of Merleau-Ponty's late revolutionary philosophy by following its most salient, previously unexplored paths.