The Seba library treats Intentional Arc in 8 passages, across 3 authors (including Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Thompson, Evan, Gallagher, Shaun).
Beneath intelligence as beneath perception, we discover a more fundamental function, ‘a vector mobile in all directions like a searchlight, one through which we can direct ourselves towards anything, in or outside ourselves’
Merleau-Ponty introduces the intentional arc as a pre-intellectual, bodily directedness revealed by Schneider’s deficits — the foundational motor-intentional power that ordinary perception and action presuppose.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
Spacetime loop of the intentional arc, 367–369
Thompson formalises the intentional arc as a ‘spacetime loop,’ embedding Merleau-Ponty’s concept within a dynamic systems framework that couples organism and environment across time.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
with an intentionality which follows the general flow of existence and yields to its movements. Schneider can no longer put himself into a sexual situation any more than generally he occupies an effective one
Merleau-Ponty demonstrates the clinical collapse of the intentional arc in Schneider: without it, spontaneous affective, social, and intellectual engagement with the world becomes impossible.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
body-schematic mechanisms support intentional action and are structured and regulated by relevant intentional goals … These embodied mechanisms enable the exercise of free will.
Gallagher argues that prenoetic body-schematic operations — the substrate of the intentional arc — structurally underwrite intentional agency without themselves requiring conscious deliberation.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
bodily feelings are not self-enclosed without openness to the world. On the contrary, they present things in a certain affective light or atmosphere and thereby deeply influence how we perceive and respond to things.
Thompson extends the arc’s logic to affective intentionality, arguing that bodily feelings are world-disclosing in exactly the manner Merleau-Ponty’s intentional arc implies.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
the body acquires a certain organization or style in its relations with its environment … it appropriates certain habitual postures and movements; it incorporates various significant parts of its environment into its own schema
Gallagher’s account of the body schema as organisational style and environmental incorporation provides the structural-neurological correlate of Merleau-Ponty’s intentional arc.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
The body image consists of a complex set of intentional states and dispositions — perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes — in which the intentional object is one’s own body. This involves a form of reflexive or self-referential intentionality.
Gallagher distinguishes body image (reflexive, object-directed intentionality) from the prenoetic body schema, clarifying what the intentional arc is not — a conscious, self-directed act.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005aside
Sensorimotor contingency theory, 254 … Skillful coping, 313–316 … Spacetime loop of the intentional arc, 367–369
Thompson’s index places the intentional arc alongside sensorimotor contingency theory and skillful coping as cognate accounts of embodied, non-representational world-engagement.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside