Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a french phenomenological filosopher. Setting himself apart from the philosophy of Edmund Husserl he viewed phenomenology as a method to overcome the division of subject-object. Merleau-Ponty was interested in the embodied experience in relation to the surrounding world. The embodied experience of the human being is the focal point for Merleau-Ponty and at the same time you can not consider him to be a behaviorist. The body as a physical object is for Merleau-Ponty an abstraction compared to the actual body.
Through the embodied experience you find your primary tool to know and connect to the surrounding world and environment. Perception plays a foundational role in understanding and engaging in the world. Merleau-Ponty pointed to the bodily experience and knowledge as the point to refer to your surroundings. Merleau-Ponty understood the primacy of the embodiment as the source of knowledge.
From Phenomenology of perception, further papers studied the primacy of embodiment. The ontology of “the flesh of the world” (la chair du monde), the incomplete work The Visible and Invisible, and his last published essay, “Eye and Mind”.