Nietzsche and Heidegger saw in modernity a time endangered by nihilism. Starting out from this interpretation, David Levin links the nihilism raging today in Western society and culture to our concrete historical experience with vision.

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 Levinas, 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....

This is a unique study, contuining the work of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and using the techniques of phenomenology against the prevailing nihilism of our culture. It expands our understanding of the human potential for spiritual self-realization by interpreting it as the developing of a bodily-felt awareness informing our gestures and movements. The author argues that a psychological focus on our experience of well-being and pathology as embodied beings contributes significantly to a historically relevant critique of ideology. It also provides an essential touchstone in experience for a...

Eugene Gendlin's contribution to the theory of language is the focus of this collection of essays edited by David Michael Levin. This compilation of critical studies--each followed by a comment from Gendlin himself--investigates how concepts grow out of experience, and explores relations between Gendlin's philosophy of language and experience and the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Dilthey, and Heidegger.

Eugene Gendlin's contribution to the theory of language is the focus of this collection of essays edited by David Michael Levin. This compilation of critical studies--each followed by a comment from Gendlin himself--investigates how concepts grow out of experience, and explores relations between Gendlin's philosophy of language and experience and the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Dilthey, and Heidegger.

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.