Introduction

This chapter introduces the book. It gives an outline of the chapters. Before this, it gives some historical context to the writing of the Preface of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. The chapter also discusses Merleau-Ponty’s own criticism of Phenomenology of Perception in his later work, The Visible and the Invisible. There, Merleau-Ponty finds his term “tacit ego” problematic. I argue that this does not mean we need to abandon the earlier phenomenology in favor of the later ontology, that the Preface is already on the way to an ontological articulation of phenomenology which is unique to Merleau-Ponty.