In 1952, Merleau-Ponty was appointed to a chair at the Collège de France in Paris, one of the pinnacles of academic life in France, and continued in that post until his death in 1961. His inaugural lecture, “In Praise of Philosophy”, in which he examines the function of philosophy, first through considering particular past philosophers (Lavelle, Bergson, Socrates) and then by discussing in more general terms the relation between philosophy's past and its present, was published in book form in 1953. Summaries of his lecture courses at the Collège de France were published in book form after his death, in 1968, and he published a number of articles, both on philosophy and on current political issues, in journals and periodicals. But he did not publish any further philosophical monographs in his lifetime. He was, however, working in these last years on two book-length projects, which reveal interesting new developments in his thinking. One, The Prose of the World, seems to have been abandoned without completion; he was still working on the other, The Visible and the Invisible, at the time of his death, so that it is incomplete for different reasons. Both were published in their incomplete form, with some editing by his friend Claude Lefort, after his death. In this chapter, I want to examine each of these works in turn before attempting to draw some general conclusions, from them and from the earlier writings, about Merleau-Ponty's work as a whole.