Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was an anti-empiricist who sought to reconstruct the world based on a phenomenology of human perception. He was influenced by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), was friends with Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) for a while, and continues to be of great interest to phenomenological philosophers of mind. His principal works are The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), numerous essays, and his unfinished The Visible and the Invisible.