In a special memorial edition of Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times), published only months after Maurice Merleau-Ponty's death in 1961, the French philosopher Jean Hyppolite wrote of Merleau-Ponty: "His work has become as familiar to us as those landscapes which we no longer see because they are always there, implicated in the way we see . . . presupposed by our research, sedimented in our thought." Philosophers and cultural theorists alike continue to owe a debt to Merleau-Ponty, whose work has informed disciplines across the humanities. Famous as an "existential phenomenologist," he is arguably best known as the philosopher of the body who sought to dismantle the Cartesian legacy in philosophy, a legacy in which mind and body are posited as two distinct substances whose causal interrelation, consequently, proved vexing to philosophers. He worked tirelessly to undermine the binary logic that had come to define philosophy since the ancients, including such presumed...