Husserl and Julián Marías: Toward a situated Phenomenology of the Body

Abstract

This article compares Edmund Husserl’s and Julián Marías’s accounts of the body. Starting from Husserl’s Leib/Körperdistinction and his emphasis on bodily orientation, localized sensations, and motility, I argue that Marías’s metaphysical anthropology widens transcendental phenomenology by integrating a biographical and circumstantial understanding of embodiment. Marías’s notions of empirical structure and installation articulate the body as the personal way of being-in-the-world, beyond mere perceptual mediation. The comparison reveals convergences (the body as zero-point of orientation, psychophysical unity, the primacy of touch) and divergences (transcendental-perceptual focus vs. biographical-circumstantial focus), paving the way for a situated phenomenology of the body.