Knowra Maurice Merleau-Ponty Maurice Merleau-Ponty Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher whose phenomenology treated perception as embodied and situated, challenging the separation of mind from body and world.
Phenomenology : A philosophical approach that describes structures of experience as they appear to consciousness. Merleau-Ponty adapted this approach to show how bodily experience shapes what appears.
Motor intentionality : The body's practical directedness toward possible actions and goals. It names the bodily know-how through which a situation calls forth movement.
Edmund Husserl : A German philosopher who founded phenomenology and analyzed the structures of conscious experience. Merleau-Ponty drew on Husserl while emphasizing the body's role in experience.
The Structure of Behavior : Merleau-Ponty's 1942 book examining behavior through relations among organism, environment, and consciousness. It establishes the behavioral and scientific problems his later phenomenology develops.
The Visible and the Invisible : Merleau-Ponty's unfinished, posthumously published work on perception, visibility, and the world's intertwining. It develops his later account of how perceiver and perceived belong to one field.
Intentionality : The directedness of consciousness toward objects, ideas, or states of affairs. His account makes this directedness bodily and practical, not merely mental.
Motor schema : An organized pattern of movement that coordinates bodily actions toward a task. Merleau-Ponty's account uses skilled movement to explain bodily understanding.
Martin Heidegger : A German philosopher whose work examined existence, temporality, and being-in-the-world. He shares Merleau-Ponty's opposition to conceiving the subject as detached from its world.
Phenomenology of Perception : Merleau-Ponty's 1945 book arguing that perception is grounded in embodied existence. This is his fullest account of the lived body and perceptual experience.
Flesh (philosophy) : Merleau-Ponty's term for the shared element linking perceiving bodies and the visible world. This later concept extends embodiment beyond an individual body's boundaries.
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