PHILOSOPHERS UNION EDITION #1

Friday, April 9th, 8:30 PM, Free
The Red Room
425 E. 31st Street, Baltimore

*PHILOSOPHERS UNION EDITION #1: Alphonso Lingis!*

The Red Room has a new series: PHILOSOPHER'S UNION ("Keep thinking live!").* For the first installment, we are extraordinarily happy to have Alphonso Lingis, one of the most interesting philosophers of the present age. Lingis has created a unique synthesis of the concerns of academic philosophy, with a highly creative and risk-taking existential endeavor. A description of his talk is included below.

*The Outsiders--A Talk by Alphonso Lingis.*
In 1922 Dr. Hans Prinzhorn published Artistry of the Mentally Ill--in which he reproduced and analyzed 187 from the more than 5000 paintings, drawings, and carvings he had collected from insane asylums in and around Heidelberg, mostly from patients diagnosed as schizophrenic. Professional artists were astouned by what they saw in this book; Paul Elouard called it "the most beautiful book of images there is." Jean Dubuffet argued that the mentally ill had access to the fundamental sources of human creativity, and launched a far-reaching criticism of the professional "art world" and the taste of the cultivated elite. The paper examines the new conceptions of art, of creativity, and of authenticity that were advanced by the champions of this art. It also examines the subsequent production of the art of the self-taught, and the ideas about all this work that have been elaborated since.

*About Alphonso Lingis*
Alphonso Lingis (born November 23, 1933 in Crete, Illinois) is an American philosopher, writer and translator, and was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization include phenomenology, existentialism, modern philosophy, and ethics.

Lingis has had wide success as a public lecturer due both to his captivating style of writing and also the performance art atmosphere of his lectures. During public talks he generally appears in costume or speaks amidst strange background music or recorded screams, often in total darkness. Throughout his years at Penn State, he was also well known as a classic college town cult celebrity, welcoming students to a strange home filled with rare birds, dangerous fish and insects, and numerous third world artifacts. In this period his travels shifted increasingly from Europe to the developing world, with especial bases in Bangkok and Rio de Janeiro, and most recently Africa. In recent years he has also renewed contact with his ancestral heritage, reaching a certain degree of prominence in Lithuania. Now retired from Penn State, Lingis lives near Baltimore, where he continues to write books similar to his earlier works. His books have been translated into French and Turkish, among other languages. In the spring of 2004 the first college course on Lingis was offered at Towson University in Towson, Maryland, taught by Wolfgang W. Fuchs co-editor of "Encounters with Lingis" (2003).

* in the 90's, The Philosophers Union was an ill-defined collective project involving Stephen Schzelkun, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENINECE, and many others. We have resurrected it at the Red Room for this new free lecture series.