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.