Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenologist who placed the lived body at the centre of philosophical inquiry, arguing against both Cartesian dualism that reduces the body to mechanism and idealist traditions that subordinate the body to consciousness. His Phenomenology of Perception showed that perception is not a passive reception of data processed by a disembodied mind, but an active, embodied engagement with the world in which body and world are always already intertwined.