1,721,137 research outputs found
Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis
Get PDFAlphonso Lingis is the author of fourteen books and many essays. He is emeritus professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. While many know him only as an eccentric ex-professor or as the translator of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Klossowski, he is arguably the most distinctive voice in American continental philosophy. This is no doubt due to the perpetual travel that fuels his arresting written prose and unorthodox public readings. Lingis’s lifelong itinerary includes visits — some brief, others extended or recurring — to 109 countries. Along the way he has photographed innumerable strangers whose faces adorn the pages of his books. Photography is as essential to Lingis’s multidisciplinary philosophical perspective as is his knowledge of phenomenology, anthropology, or psychoanalysis. Some of his photographs have been recently collected and published in the book Contact. Unlike most career academics, Lingis has made a name for himself collecting exotic birds and other creatures, staging performance readings at professional conferences, keeping up a diligent correspondence with friends at home and abroad, and splicing together high theory with intimate autobiography. Those who know him speak of his warmth, sincerity, and noncombative style of argumentation — rare traits among university scholars. Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis gathers a diverse collection of texts on Lingis’s life and philosophy, including poetry, original interviews, essays, book reviews, and a photo essay. It also includes an unpublished piece by Lingis, “Doubles,” along with copies of several of his letters to a friend
Episode 134: Thinking and Animals with Alphonso Lingis
No full textThis week on Knowing Animals we are joined by Alphonso Lingis. Al is Professor of philosophy at Penn State University. We discuss his book chapter ‘The thinking that is in the world’, which was included in book Thinking in the World: A Reader’, edited by Jill Bennett, Mary Zournazi and published by Bloomsbury in 2019
Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis
Get PDFAlphonso Lingis is the author of fourteen books and many essays. He is emeritus professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. While many know him only as an eccentric ex-professor or as the translator of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Klossowski, he is arguably the most distinctive voice in American continental philosophy. This is no doubt due to the perpetual travel that fuels his arresting written prose and unorthodox public readings. Lingis’s lifelong itinerary includes visits — some brief, others extended or recurring — to 109 countries. Along the way he has photographed innumerable strangers whose faces adorn the pages of his books. Photography is as essential to Lingis’s multidisciplinary philosophical perspective as is his knowledge of phenomenology, anthropology, or psychoanalysis. Some of his photographs have been recently collected and published in the book Contact. Unlike most career academics, Lingis has made a name for himself collecting exotic birds and other creatures, staging performance readings at professional conferences, keeping up a diligent correspondence with friends at home and abroad, and splicing together high theory with intimate autobiography. Those who know him speak of his warmth, sincerity, and noncombative style of argumentation — rare traits among university scholars. Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis gathers a diverse collection of texts on Lingis’s life and philosophy, including poetry, original interviews, essays, book reviews, and a photo essay. It also includes an unpublished piece by Lingis, “Doubles,” along with copies of several of his letters to a friend
Existential anthropology of Alphonso Lingis
No full textŠiame straipsnyje aptariama Alphonso Lingio filosofinė antropologija egzistenciniame kontekste. Tyrinėjamos filosofo ir keliautojo patirtys. Filosofinė veikla ir kelionės – tai neatskiriamos patirtys. Lingio fenomenologinė filosofija siejasi su tuo, kas gali būti sąlygiškai įvardijama kaip egzistencinė antropologija. Istoriškai egzistencializmas kaip intelektinis sąjūdis yra tarsi pasibaigęs. Tačiau tai, kas baigiasi tradicinėje filosofijoje, atgyja kitose, giminingose filosofijos disciplinose. Tokią giminingą mąstymo ir veiklos strategiją galima laikyti antropologiją. Egzistencinės Lingio kelionės gali būti suvokiamos dvejopai: viena vertus, tai skirtingų šalių ir kraštų lankymas, kita vertus, tai kelionė į savo patirtį. Kelionės patirtis susijusi su mąstymo patirtimi. Mintis nėra izoliuota nuo kitų minčių. Apmąstymas visada susijęs su tam tikra atmosfera, nuotaika, būsena. Mintis gyva, kai ji šaukiasi kitos minties, o mąstymas gyvas, kai gali inspiruoti kitą mąstymą. Filosofija yra kelionė keliomis netiesinėmis gyvenimo maršrutų kryptimis. Kelio trajektorija gali būti suvokiama kaip nuotoliai ar atstumai nuo kažko ar kažko link. Tačiau tai gali būti suvokiama ir kaip tebevykstantys gyvenimo susidūrimai ar gyvenimo įvykiai. Filosofinė kelionė į tai, kas nesu aš pats, padeda apibrėžti savo Aš ir patikslinti savo ribas. Kartu tai kelionė į savo patirtį. Keliaudamas žmogus atsiveria ir patiria save ir pasaulį aplink save. Reikšminiai žodžiai: Alfonsas Lingis; Alphonso Lingis; Antropologija; Asmeninių išgyvenimų fenomenai; Egzistencializmas; Egzistencinė antropologija; Fenomenologija; Filosofinė antropologija; Filosofinė antropologija, Alfonsas Lingis; Kelionių patirtis; Kelionė; Kelionės patirtis; Patirties antropologija; Žmogiškoji patirtis; Alfonso Lingis; Alphonso Lingis; Anthropology; Anthropology existencial; Anthropology of experience; Existentialism; Experience of journeys; Phenomenology; Philosophical anthropology; Philosophical anthropology, human experience, travel experience, experienced phenomena; TravelThe author of this article aims to review philosophical anthropology of A. Lingis in existential context. Experiences of philosopher and traveller are often closely intertwined. Philosophical activity and philosophical travel experience are inseparable experiences. Phenomenological philosophy of A. Lingis is connected with what is relatively defined as existential anthropology. Unique and unrepeatable events reveal themselves in philosopher's personal and travel experienc
Whose story is it anyway? The ethics of narration and the narration of ethics in Summertime and Die Sneeuslaper
No full textIncludes bibliographical references.This dissertation analyses and compares the narrative strategies in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime and Marlene van Niekerk’s Die sneeuslaper and considers the implications of these strategies for the authors’ exploration of the ethics of writing. Much has been written about the literary oeuvres of both Coetzee and Van Niekerk, including studies of the translations of Van Niekerk’s Afrikaans novels into English. There are few “interlingual” comparative studies of contemporary works in Afrikaans and English, however, and certainly none to my knowledge which compares the work of Coetzee and Van Niekerk. My contribution to the conversation about Coetzee’s and Van Niekerk’s work, but also to an increasingly multilingual and interconnected South African literary criticism, will be a comparison of one recent work by each of these two authors, written in English and Afrikaans respectively. I draw on the theories of Bakhtin, Barthes and Levinas to consider the ethical dimension of texts in which “double-voicedness”, a questioning not only of existence, but of the self is fore grounded in the content and narrative structure; where there is a shift in focus from the author to the reader (“the birth of the reader”) and “utterances” are made with the response of “the other” in mind
Facing nature: the infinite in the flesh
Get PDFThis thesis explores the relation between two interpretations of chora, drawn from a reading of Plato's Timaeus. The first I label the elemental chora. The second, I call the social chora. The first chapter addresses the elements in Ionian philosophy, with an eye toward the political and social backdrop of the important cosmological notion of isonomia, law of equals. Here social and elemental are continuous. Chapter two looks at the next phase of Presocratic thought, Elea, specifically Parmenides and his influence on later thought, then turns to Heidegger's reading of Parmenides' through the key word of aletheia. Finally, I offer a reading of Parmenides through a different key word - trust. The third chapter examines Plato's cosmology in the Timaeus, focusing on the way the beginning of this dialogue inflects the dialogue in a political/social direction, putting the social chora in tension with the elemental chora that the body of the Timaeus' discusses. In the fourth chapter, which examines the Phaedrus, this tension is inverted, since this dialogue on writing and justice set in what proves to be the mesmerizing and erotic elemental milieu of the world outside the walls of the polis. The second half of the dissertation turns to some modern thinkers within the phenomenological tradition or its wake who write about elementals. Chapter five examines Gaston Bachelard's reveries on imagination which dream the natural world of fire, air, water, and earth from the standpoint of what he calls material and dynamic imagination, concepts that imply a strong sense of embodiment. Chapter six treats Levinas' description of the elemental and fixes it in a stark relation to the human. I will suggest some possible points of contact between the elemental and the social in Levinas. Chapter seven turns to John Sallis' analysis of the imagination as the means of access proper to the elemental in ways that differ from Bachelard. He position the earth as a fundamental other. I will suggest that in the end his position inherits Heidegger's lack of emphasis on embodied and needy humanity. Alphonso Lingis offers his own unique reading of the elemental in a more Levinasian and Merleau-Pontian vein, speaking of the directives the world, both human and natural, puts to us, and returning to a philosophy of substance that puts the body in the picture. Chapter eight uses his thought to focus the issue of the dissertation
Hospitality and the Ethics of Improvisation in the Work of Ingemar Lindh
Get PDFIngemar Lindh's work on the principles of collective improvisation has crucial implications for the history of twentieth-century laboratory theatre. His early work with Étienne Decroux and Jerzy Grotowski contributed to the development of a unique practice that resists directorial montage, fixed scores, and choreography; and the ethical dimension that accompanies Lindh's research on collective improvisation is illuminating for a more holistic understanding of the technical and aesthetic considerations in theatre. In this article, Frank Camilleri discusses some of the key aspects of this dimension, notably the dynamics of hospitality and encounter that inform Lindh's approach and the question of responsibility in the actor's work. Frank Camilleri is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Kent. From 2004 to 2008 he was Academic Coordinator of Theatre Studies at the University of Malta. He is also Artistic Director of Icarus Performance Project – an ongoing research laboratory that investigates the intermediary space between training and performance processes. Camilleri's work with Lindh in the mid-1990s was instrumental for the development of this research practice
Towards an ontology of fetishes: an interview with Alphonso Lingis
No full textAlphonso Lingis (1933– ) is an American continental philosopher and translator who is currently Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.1 Associated with the phenomenology, existentialism, and the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lingis’s philosophical influences also encompass the literary works of Pierre Klossowski and Yukio Mishima, Michel Tournier, and the postpsychoanalytic theory of Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. Lingis’s philosophical concerns are thus similar to those of major continental philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault, and with whom he often engages in sustained dialogues on everything from sensuality and anthropology to travelogue, the human body, inanimate objects, the elements, and perception
On waiting for something to happen
Get PDFThis paper seeks to examine two particular and peculiar practices in which the mediation of apparently direct encounters is made explicit and is systematically theorized: that of the psychoanalytic dialogue with its inward focus and private secluded setting, and that of theatre and live performance, with its public focus. Both these practices are concerned with ways in which “live encounters” impact on their participants, and hence with the conditions under which, and the processes whereby, the coming-together of human subjects results in recognizable personal or social change. Through the rudimentary analysis of two anecdotes, we aim to think these encounters together in a way that explores what each borrows from the other, the psychoanalytic in the theatrical, the theatrical in the psychoanalytic, figuring each practice as differently committed to what we call the “publication of liveness”. We argue that these “redundant” forms of human contact continue to provide respite from group acceptance of narcissistic failure in the post-democratic era through their offer of a practice of waiting
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