Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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Maurice Jean-Jacques Merleau-Ponty was born on 14 March 1908 in the seaside town of Rochefort-sur-Mer to a Catholic family. Following the loss of his father in the First World War, he was brought up by his mother with his brother and sister. He began his secondary education in Le Havre before finishing at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and entering the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in 1926. There he studied under Léon Brunschvicg, Jean Cavaillès, Émile Bréhier and others, and counted Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Raymond Aron among his friends. After graduating and obtaining his

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in 1930, he continued on this typical path for a French academic and became a philosophy teacher at a lycée in Beauvais. Looking back in the 1950s upon his…

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Citation: Hung, Wai-Shun. "Maurice Merleau-Ponty". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 November 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3090, accessed 28 March 2024.]

3090 Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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