Alphonso Lingis, 91, American philosopher, Dies at 91

Lithuanian-born philosopher, writer, and translator Alphonso Lingis died in 2025. He served as an emeritus philosophy professor at Penn State University. He was an ethics, existentialism, and phenomenology expert. Many of Lingis’ works use photographs that illustrate his philosophical thoughts.

Alphonso Lingis Obituary : His Biography and Legal Legacy

Alphonso Lingis’ Career

Lingis earned his master’s at Belgium’s Catholic University of Leuven after studying at Loyola University in Chicago. He did his dissertation on Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty while studying under Alphonse de Waelhens. Lingis returned to the US and taught at Duquesne. After joining Penn State University in the mid-1960s, he published extensively on philosophical history and became interested in Continental philosophy, which influenced his later publications.

Over the years, Lingis translated Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Klossowski.

His first book, Excesses (1983), started a series on ethnography, jet-set society, and Continental philosophy. Lingis wrote Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Abuses, and Foreign Bodies in 1994. Despite his mid-60s age, Lingis wrote Dangerous Emotions in 2000 with limited-experience “dares” and philosophical references.

His further writings include Trust (2004), Body Transformations (2005), The First Person Singular (2007), Violence and Splendor (2011), and Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality (2018). In his writings, Lingis goes beyond good and evil with a raw, sexual, and vulgar philosophy. “The unlived life is not worth examining”—Lingis’s phrase from Abuses (1994)—is emphasized in these works. In his “phenomenology” monographs like The Imperative (1998), Lingis emphasizes the Socratic “the unexamined life is not worth living” notion.

• Excesses: Eros and Culture (1983)
• Libido: The French Existential Theories (1985)
• Phenomenological Explanations (1986)
• Deathbound Subjectivity (1989)
• The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994)
• Abuses (1994)
• Foreign Bodies (1994)
• Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (1995)
• The Imperative (1998)
• Dangerous Emotions (2000)
• Trust (2004)
• Body Transformations (2005)
• The First Person Singular (2007)
• Wonders Seen in Forsaken Places: An Essay on the Photographs and the Process of Photography of Mark Cohen (2010)
• Contact [photographs] (2010)
• Violence and Splendor (2011)
• The Alphonso Lingis Reader, edited by Tom Sparrow (2018)
• Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality (2018)

Translations (French into English)

• Emmanuel Levinas wrote ‘De l’existence à l’existent’ in 1947. Translated by Lingis as Existence and Existents (2001).
• Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité (1961). Translated by Lingis as Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1969).
• Emmanuel Levinas, “Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence”, was published in 1974. Translated by Lingis as Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (Springer, 1991).
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote Le visible et l’Invisible in 1964. Translated by Lingis as
• Pierre Klossowski wrote ‘Sade, mon prochain’ in 1947. Translated by Lingis as Sade My Neighbor (1991).

Honoring Alphonso Lingis

In moments like these, we feel the loss deeply. Alphonso Lingis had a profound impact on many lives.

If you have any memories or thoughts to share, please feel free to leave a comment below. Let’s come together to remember and celebrate her life.

Alphonso Lingis, professor emeritus of philosophy at Penn State, has died.

— Justin Weinberg (@dailynous.com) 2025-05-09T18:45:53.031Z