David Kleinberg-Levin


David Kleinberg-Levin is an American philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He is known for his works on 19th and 20th century continental European philosophy. His primary focus, influenced in part by Friedrich Schiller, is the formation of an approach to morality and ethical life with an emphasis on perception and sensibility. In 2005, he retired as Professor Emeritus from Northwestern University.

Philosophy

Kleinberg-Levin’s lifetime project in philosophy, which he has called “The Body of Ontological Understanding,” draws on a hermeneutical phenomenology in order to illuminate, in the light of critical social theory, the stages in a process of self-development embodying in the maturity of seeing, hearing, movement and gesturing, a sensibility and understanding conducive to participating in the flourishing of ethical life and contributing to its empathic openness to the Other. Recently, he has also made caring for the natural environment a theme for his research and thought, arguing that, in the acquisition of language, the infant is solicited and induced by the sounds of nature and the social environment to replicate these sounds in forming speech. And this indebtedness or beholdenness to nature in the learning of language, he argues, constitutes a reciprocating moral responsibility for the natural environment, as well as a strong reciprocal moral responsibility to serve the community and its culture.

Books

  • Reason And Evidence In Husserl's Phenomenology
  • The Body's Recollection Of Being
  • The Opening Of Vision
  • The Listening Self
  • The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity In The Shadows Of Enlightenment
  • Gestures of Ethical Life: Holderlin's Question of Measure After Heidegger
  • Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty's Ecology and Levinas's Ethics
  • Redeeming Words and the Promise of Happiness: A Critical Theory Approach to Wallace Stevens and Vladimir Nabokov
  • Redeeming Words: Language and the Promise of Happiness in the Stories of Döblin and Sebald
  • Beckett's Words: The Promise of Happiness in a Time of Mourning
  • Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Perception: Introduction, vol. I
  • Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Perception: Learning to See, Learning to Hear, vol. II
  • ''Critical Studies on Heidegger: The Emerging Body of Understanding''

    Edited

  • Pathologies Of The Modern Self
  • Modernity And The Hegemony Of Vision
  • Sites Of Vision
  • ''Language Beyond Postmodernism''