Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908-1961)

French philosopher, one of the most significant contributors to phenomenology after Edmund Husserl. He attempted to move beyond the notion of a pure experiencing consciousness, arguing in The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) that perception is intertwined with bodily awareness and with language. In his posthumously published work The Visible and the Invisible (1964), he argued that our experience is inherently ambiguous and elusive and that the traditional concepts of philosophy are therefore inadequate to grasp it.