Description: Provides a critique of reason, demanding that we take greater responsibility for nature and other people.
Brief description: David Michael Kleinberg-Levin is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Northwestern University. His many books include Redeeming Words: Language and the Promise of Happiness in the Stories of Döblin and Sebald and Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty's Ecology and Levinas's Ethics, both published by SUNY Press.
Review Quotes:
"Kleinberg-Levin is that rare phenomenologist who continually 'does phenomenology, ' instead of just talking about its necessity. He finds in Merleau-Ponty's work the concrete phenomena of childhood and language progression that justifies the distinctions that are made about the priority of the phenomena. Kleinberg-Levin demands that phenomenological description not be speculative and metaphysical, but rather have a basis in the human developmental process. The work on Levinas in the second half of the book is equally exquisite, if not more so." - Glen A. Mazis, author of Earthbodies: Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses
"Kleinberg-Levin has brilliantly rendered the phenomenology and ontology of Merleau-Ponty and the ethical philosophy of alterity developed by Levinas as an address to the ecological crisis of the earth and sky. He has done so with both wide-ranging scholarly erudition and a sense of practical urgency. This is a work of true philosophical wisdom for our times, written in a voice of compassion and strength." - Galen A. Johnson, author of Earth and Sky, History and Philosophy: Island Images Inspired by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty