Alphonso Lingis


Alphonso Lingis 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, 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. Lingis also began working at his translation projects, and over the years, translated authors included Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Klossowski.
His first book was Excesses. Lingis followed up on this project in 1994 by publishing three books: 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, The First Person Singular, Violence and Splendor and Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality. In the books listed above, Lingis’s philosophical style is visceral and occasionally obscene. These books involve a jet-set Continental philosophy-referencing anthropology. Lingis’s motto from Abuses that “The unlived life is not worth examining” is categorically emphasized in these books. Lingis’s “phenomenology” monographs, on the other hand, emphasize the Socratic point that “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Books