Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher associated with existential phenomenology, was the youngest philosopher ever to be appointed to the chair once occupied by Henri Bergson at the Collège de France. Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer on March 14, 1908. His father died early in his childhood; he and his brother and sister were raised by his mother. He attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and then the École Normale Supérieure earning his aggregation in 1930. He taught in lycées and then was mobilized in the Fifth Infantry Regiment, and served as a second lieutenant from 1939 until demobilization in 1940. During the occupation he participated in the Résistance. After the liberation in 1945 he taught at the Université de Lyon; during this time he, together with Jean-Paul Sartre, founded the avant-garde journal, Les temps modernes. In was also in 1945 that his major work, the Phenomenology of Perception...