Alphonso Lingis writes philosophy the way a non-philosopher might envision it: as a transference of wisdom. More narrating than arguing his philosophical ideas, he avoids the trappings of academic writing without slipping into naïveté or paternalism. Books like The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994), The Imperative (1998), and Violence and Splendor (2011) examine encounters with foreignness and with otherness, and the ways we become alienated from ourselves. They also investigate language, the drives of individuality, and the ways we are possessed by our environment. Stylized, personal, and singular, they take as their subject the whole spectrum of existence, from interpersonal dramas to the sweep of geopolitical history. 

The philosopher Simon Critchley called Lingis “one of the only original voices in US continental philosophy.” In a collection of essays dedicated to Lingis’s thought, David Farrell Krell wrote that the only appropriate criticism of Lingis would be akin to D. H. Lawrence’s concern about Walt Whitman: that he “has let his soul bleed into every corner of the natural and cultural world, his body leak into every nook and cranny of the universe.”