The World of Perception

The author was one of the most important thinkers of the post-war era. Central to his thought was the idea that human understanding comes from our bodily experience of the world that we perceive: a deceptively simple argument, perhaps, but one that he felt had to be made in the wake of attacks from contemporary science and the philosophy of Descartes on the reliability of human perception. From this starting point, the author presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception to French radio listeners in 1948. Available in a paperback English translation for the first time in the Routledge Classics series to mark the centenary of the author's birth, this is a dazzling and accessible guide to a whole universe of experience, from the pursuit of scientific knowledge, through the psychic life of animals to the glories of the art of Paul Cézanne.