Lingis attended
Loyola University in Chicago, then pursued graduate studies at the
Catholic University of Leuven in
Belgium. His doctoral dissertation, written under , was a discussion of 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 at 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.” == Books ==