David Kleinberg-Levin obtained a Ph.D. Columbia University and is Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University. He taught in the Humanities Department at MIT from 1968 until 1972, when he joined the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern.
“The heart of his work is disclosive hermeneutical phenomenology, which, after major alterations in the method itself, he brings to bear in innovative ways on questions and problems in aesthetics, clinical psychology, moral philosophy and critical social theory. The philosophers most important to his work are, in addition to the German philosophers of the late eighteenth and early nineteeenth century, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Foucault.”
Alchemy of the Third Millennium, Day 2, 1/2
Excellent lecture by one of the leading figures in American phenomenology on Merleau-Ponty, flesh,sympathetic speculations, and ontology, while I am an advocate for existential anthropo-logoi/analysis (and have a private clinical practice in such) I certainly understand the desire/impetus for wanting a more encompassing view and prefer Merleau-Ponty to those like Whitehead or Jung (and the contemporary mysterians) who would project theo-logical pre-judices into their, and by extension our, works. What do folks make of the possibilities of thinking in terms of living with elements as opposed to speculating on objects?
Related articles
- Phenomenology and Process Ontology: Evan Thompson, Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead, and the Growing Together of the Flesh of the World (footnotes2plato.com)
- Primordial Perception – Ryan Lautenbacher (embodiedperception.wordpress.com)
- holding forth the image (syntheticzero.net)
- Merleau-Ponty’s Child Psychology by Talia Welsh (anagnori.wordpress.com)
- Downloads Phenomenology of Perception book (ipwawase.wordpress.com)
- Harman on Heidegger: ‘Buildings as Tool-Beings’ (bodyoftheory.com)
- Between presence and absence: How does the body perceive the world after a loss? (areyouhungup.wordpress.com)
- Why Phenomenology? – Ryan Lautenbacher (embodiedperception.wordpress.com)
Thanks for directing my attention to this lecture! There are many thematic overlaps with my dissertation work… I’d known of Levin’s work, having read “The Body’s Recollection of Being” a few years back, but this was a nice reminder.
my pleasure, I was just telling AR/Knowledge-Ecology that we may not agree on what acts of imagination/attention, like the use of metaphors/perspicuous-re-minders, are but we can agree I think that they can make a difference in our lives and I think when we get down to attending to what role they actually play in our lives (and not just what we might ideally desire them to mean/do) than we might all be able to work together, check out the talks here by Jan Verwoert if you get a chance.