Philosophy
The Ryerson University Philosophy Club presents:
The Third Annual Public Lecture in Philosophy
Violence and Splendor
by Alphonso Lingis
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 6:30 p.m.
201 Heidelberg Building
125 Bond Street, TorontoFree and open to the public.
For more information contact: philclub@ryerson.ca
416.979.5000 ext. 1-2700
ABSTRACT:
This multi-media presentation will explore how to understand collective performance, using as examples the Rio de Janeiro Carnaval and the Mount Hagen Show in Papua-New Guinea.
BIO:
Alphonso Lingis is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His twelve books—among them, The First Person Singular, Dangerous Emotions, Body Transformations, The Imperative, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Trust, Excesses, Foreign Bodies—have been translated into five languages. Lingis’s scholarly works on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas have made important contributions to Continental Philosophy.
But Lingis’s writings from the past couple of decades reach far beyond philosophical scholarship, and have won Lingis an audience much greater than that of professional philosophers. Informed by phenomenology and recent French philosophy, but also by anthropology, psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and his own extensive travels, Lingis explores dimensions of human existence and nature often bypassed as mundane, or thought to be unthinkable and left untouched by our theories. Through vivid, engaging, sometimes disturbing, and always thought-provoking meditations on issues including torture, state-sponsored violence, personal and collective rituals and obsessions, joyful and sublime encounters with nature, and the implicit ethical bonds at work in everyday interpersonal interactions, Lingis puts some of the most difficult philosophical ideas of the 20th century to work, and teaches us to see our world in terms of them. Without technical jargon, and with the eloquence and passion of a great literary writer, Lingis shows us how philosophy is not merely a field of study, but a way of deepening our engagements with others, the world, and ourselves.
Bookmark with:
