The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment

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University of California Press, Apr 28, 2023 - Philosophy - 502 pages
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.
 

Contents

Gestalt Gestell Geviert The Way of the Lighting
114
The Field of Vision Intersections of the Visible and the Invisible in Heidegger and MerleauPonty
168
Outside the Subject MerleauPontys Chiasmic Vision
214
The Invisible Face of Humanity Levinas on the Justice of the Gaze
232
Justice in the Seers Eyes Benjamin and Heidegger on a Vision out of Time and Memory
334
Shadows Reflections on the Enlightenment and Modernity
406
Where the Beauty of Truth Lies
417
Copyright

The Glasses on Our Nose Wittgensteins Optics and the Illusions of Philosophy
92

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About the author (2023)

David Michael Levin is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and author of several books. Most recently he edited Language Beyond Postmodernism (1997), Sites of Vision (1997), and Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (California, 1994).

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