ABSTRACT
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s influence on intellectual life in the near half century since his death has been solid and steady, yet somewhat less spectacular than one might expect, considering the power of his ideas and their increasing relevance to contemporary philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. And far from being a philosophical throwback rendered quaint by the rise of structuralism, Merleau-Ponty played a vital role in the emergence of structuralist discourse in the 1950s. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has also played a significant role in contemporary philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive science, not only in theories of perception, but in critical engagements with cognitivism, artificial intelligence, and conceptualist theories of intentional content. The neurobiologist Francisco Varela, for example, conceived his theory of embodied cognition as an elaboration of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty often describes perceptual and bodily phenomena in terms of what he calls their “structures,” as, for example, in the title of his first book, The Structure of Behavior.
