# The Significance of Merleau- Ponty's Phi - JAMES M. EDIE **Opening (not a real abstract):** IT IS NOW more than fourteen years since we first heard of the untimely death of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. To me, and I am sure to many others, it seems much longer. MerleauPonty has already entered the history of philosophy. Though his Nachlass is still being Perception, as a "classic" even before his death. But unlike many other "classical" philosophers, Merleau-Ponty's work impresses us by its unfinished, open-ended, still-to-becompleted character. Unlike a Spinoza or an Aquinas, or even a Husserl ("the perpetual beginner"), he left his major philosophical task essentially incomplete at the time of his death. Though we cannot conceive of the phenomenological movement without his name and contribution, it is hard to think of Merleau-Ponty's thought as susceptible of generating "disciples." He achieved no system. Spinoza has disciples; Aquinas has disciples;