American philosopher
Alphonso Lingis (born November 23, 1933) is an American philosopher, writer and translator, with Lithuanian roots, currently professor emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization include phenomenology, existentialism, modern philosophy, and ethics. Lingis is also known as a photographer,[1] and he complements the philosophical themes of many of his books with his own photography.
Career
Lingis attended Loyola University in Chicago, then pursued graduate studies at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. His doctoral dissertation, written under Alphonse de Waelhens, was a discussion of the French phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. Returning to the United States, Lingis joined the faculty at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. In the mid-1960s he moved to Penn State University, where he published numerous scholarly articles on the history of philosophy, developing a passionate engagement with Continental philosophy that would prove vital to his later book career.[2] Lingis also began working at his translation projects, and over the years, translated authors including Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Klossowski.[3]
His first book was Excesses (1983), which inaugurated a series: anthropological, jet-set, Continental-philosophy-referencing books. In 1994 Lingis published three more books in a single year: The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Abuses, and Foreign Bodies. In 2000, in his mid-60's, Lingis released Dangerous Emotions, which involved a series of limit-experience “dares” along with references to a broad range of philosophical topics. Later books include Trust (2004), Body Transformations (2005), The First Person Singular (2007), Violence and Splendor (2011) and Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality (2018). In the books listed above, Lingis's philosophical style is visceral, occasionally obscene, and (to say the least) beyond good and evil. Lingis's motto from Abuses (1994) that “The unlived life is not worth examining” is categorically emphasized in these books.[4] Lingis's “phenomenology” monographs, on the other hand, (e.g. The Imperative (1998)) emphasize the Socratic point that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” In many of his books, Alphonso Lingis elaborates an epistemological ethics that broadly affirms Earthly life's polymorphous sexuality. Alphonso Lingis also sometimes writes of a politics of the body which dictates a neo-Foucauldian pain-pleasure nexus in the name of a broad base of access to power and knowledge. Alphonso Lingis rolls left-wing and hedonist, a postmodern Hemingway who lives philosophy and commits it to print.
