ABSTRACT
Of all the important contributions phenomenology has made to philosophy, it is perhaps the thematization of the role of the body in experience that is the most decisive one. Descriptions of the specific functions of the body feature in all phenomenological analyses of perception and action, as it is exemplary in the case of pioneering work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger. Whereas Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the significance of the body in the production of meaning led them to draw important metaphysical and ontological consequences about the nature of experience, the enactivists’ interest in embodiment is usually motivated by attempt to better understand the nature of perception, or how action is involved in perception. While Husserl is concerned with the experience and constitution of the body, Merleau-Ponty wants to characterize the ontological essence of the body. Emotions and affects as embodied phenomena command that we conceive of the brain and body in a new, enactive way.
