Body and World

Body and World is the definitive edition of a book that should now take its place as a major contribution to contemporary existential phenomenology. Samuel Todes goes beyond Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his description of how independent physical nature and experience are united in our bodily action. His account allows him to preserve the authority of experience while avoiding the tendency toward idealism that threatens both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Todes emphasizes the complex structure of the human body, the need to balance in a gravitational field, and so forth, and the role that structure plays in producing the spatiotemporal field of experience