Little stirs people to write as much as death's approach. Some write wills and memoirs, others write verse and farewells. Alphonso Lingis, now eighty-three years old, wrote Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality. In it, rather than providing yet another work of tame scholarship on the subject, he offers a remarkably intimate series of reflections on the process of dying that unite academic argumentation, anecdotes, and original photographs.
For most of his academic career, Lingis worked at Pennsylvania State University. There, he wrote heavily on the history of philosophy, translated the works of noted phenomenologists including Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and became somewhat well known for his writings on phenomenology, existentialism, and ethics. Many of the chapters in Irrevocable are derived from this earlier body of work, but in their placement alongside new material, they yield novel harmonies and tones. Unsurprisingly, given his past work, Lingis draws heavily on the oeuvres of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche throughout the book, though plenty of others—ranging from Gilles Deleuze to Henry David Thoreau—are cited. Yet the most captivating figures Lingis discusses aren't professional philosophers or writers, but folks that Lingis has met while traveling.
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