Protevi, John. "Review of Rosalyn Diprose, et al., eds. MERLEAU-PONTY: KEY CONCEPTS." NDPR (December 2008).

Diprose, Rosalyn, and Jack Reynolds, eds. Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts. Chesham: Acumen, 2008. The editors have compiled a useful collection of introductory essays on Merleau-Ponty. The volume would serve well as an accompanying textbook in philosophy courses or as a guide for scholars unfamiliar with Merleau-Ponty wishing a brief, clear, and comprehensive introduction to his work. For readers with some familiarity with Merleau-Ponty, however, the essays, while they do provide ample food for thought, do not by and large fully explore the many complex issues they address. This reticence is a function of the design of the book as an introductory text, and the limitation on the size of the essays. With nineteen substantive essays taking up some 220 pages, each essay is limited to approximately eleven pages. The choices of level and essay size are certainly valid editorial decisions, but it also means that the interest of the book for established readers of Merleau-Ponty will largely be on judging its suitability as a course text, though its ability to provoke reflections that might lead to continued research should not be underplayed. We should not, however, see these essays as themselves full-fledged research pieces. It might be useful in this regard to compare this book with the Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, which contains thirteen essays taking up some 360 pages, or twenty-eight pages each so each essay allows for more in-depth analysis. The result is that while the Acumen book is limited to an introductory audience, the Cambridge book provides for more sustained and more developed intellectual work for those already familiar with Merleau-Ponty. Again, this is not to fault the Acumen volume, but simply to indicate its position in the field. We might also remark that one of the editors of the Acumen volume reviewed the Cambridge volume in NDPR (http://cfweb-prod.nd.edu/philo_reviews/review.cfm?id=3881), remarking on the somewhat 'analytic' tilt of many of the Cambridge essays. The Acumen volume doesn't label itself as a 'continental' approach to Merleau-Ponty, but there is room for a good bit of metaphilosophical and/or sociological reflection on the institutionalization of contemporary philosophy in pursuing this line of thought. This review, however, is not the appropriate venue for such an undertaking. The volume is divided into four parts: an Introduction which gives a brief account of Merleau-Ponty's life and works and a brief overview of the volume, a section on "Interventions" which places Merleau-Ponty's work in relation to the major fields of intellectual inquiry with which he engaged, a section on "Inventions" which details Merleau-Ponty's conceptual innovations, and a final section on "Extensions" dealing with the way Merleau-Ponty's work has been taken up in contemporary fields of research. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14786.