Alphonso Lingis

After a brief illness he died in Maryland on May 8, 2025, at the age of 91.

• Name — Alphonso Lingis • Born — 23 November 1933 • Birthplace — Crete, Illinois, U.S. • Died — 8 May 2025 • Place of death — Maryland, U.S. • Education — Loyola University Chicago (BA) Catholic University of Leuven (PhD, 1960) • Era — Contemporary philosophy • Region — Western philosophy • School Tradition — Continental philosophy • Institutions — Pennsylvania State University • Main Interests — Phenomenology, existentialism, ethics • Doctoral Advisor — Alphonse De Waelhens • Doctoral Students — Todd May, Robert Frodeman

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 including Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Klossowski. His first book was Excesses (1983), which inaugurated a series of books with a distinctive style: personal and anthropological, set in exotic locations, replete with references to Continental-philosophy. In 1994 Lingis published three 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. 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.”