Abstract

Simone de Beauvoir's philosophical views arguably have more in common with those of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty than of any other philosopher and vice versa. And yet, resonances and dissonances between their oeuvres remain underexplored in the scholarly literature, especially in regard to the content of their respective ontologies. This chapter addresses this gap by developing an ontological interpretation of Beauvoir's concept of flesh as she employs it in The Second Sex. Following a metaphysical line of thinking from their early publications to their later work, it is suggested that Beauvoir's ontological notion of flesh is markedly akin to the one proposed by Merleau‐Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible.