David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in The Philosopher's Gaze. Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas, using our culturally dominant mode of perception and the philosophical discourse it has generated as the site for his critical reflections on the moral culture in which we are living.
In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, one way or another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision—if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing—the prospects for a radically different lifeworld. The world, after all, inevitably reflects back to us the character, the reach and range, of our vision.
In these provocative essays, the author draws on the language of hermeneutical phenomenology and at the same time refines phenomenology itself as a method of working with our experience and thinking critically about the culture in which we live.
The Philosopher's Gaze Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment
Request an Exam or Desk Copy
Recommend to Your Library (PDF)
RightsLink
Rights and Permissions
The pandemic has created major supply chain challenges for publishers, manufacturers, warehousing facilities and shipping companies. Please allow for a minimum of 15 business days to receive your order. If you need your order sooner, consider purchasing from one of our retail partner links in the buying options. Thank you!
About the Book
Reviews
"This bold and philosophically imaginative venture, problematizing the sovereignty of vision and resituating it in its relativity to the other modalities of perception, may well stand as Levin's 'consummate philosophical contribution.'"—Calvin O. Schrag, author of The Resources of Rationality"This is a unique and timely contribution. Levin's genius consists in taking material that is presumed to be familiar to philosophers and to readers of philosophy and demonstrating that something is happening in this material that was not evident before now."—Edward S. Casey, author of The Fate of Place