Alphonso Lingis

Alphonso Lingis (November 23, 1933 – May 8, 2025) was an American philosopher, writer, and translator with Lithuanian roots, and professor emeritus of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization included phenomenology, existentialism, and ethics. Lingis is also known as a photographer, and he complemented the philosophical themes of many of his books with his own photography. After a brief illness, he died in Maryland on May 8, 2025, at the age of 91. Lingis attended Loyola University Chicago, then pursued graduate studies at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. His doctoral dissertation, written under Alphonse De Waelhens, discussed 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 on 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_unexamined_life_is_not_worth_living).