Publishing Series of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities,

Jagiellonian University Press

Hermeneia in Greek means the art of interpretation, but also the art of mediation. Under this name is hidden not only the need of understanding reality, but also the need of mediating between different spans of culture. Choosing this name for our series of publications, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities would like to call attention to three phenomena: understanding as an unmovable, but nonetheless unconnected basis of the humanities, a material of life with many origins, which understanding has to do with, a large amount of languages, with the help of which people, from varied spheres of work, articulate the need for understanding. The series Hermeneia, not unlike the purpose of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, is called to be a witness to not only the academic, but also the existential multi-faceted nature of our culture. 

Alphonso Lingis is an original among American philosophers. An eloquent and insightful commentator on continental philosophers, he is also a phenomenologist who has gone to live in many lands.

Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions, Transleted into Polish: Anna Marchewka, Michał Sowiński, Kraków 2017. 

Alphonso Lingis is an original among American philosophers. An eloquent and insightful commentator on continental philosophers, he is also a phenomenologist who has gone to live in many lands. Dangerous Emotions continues the line of inquiry begun in Abuses, taking the reader to Easter Island, Japan, Java, and Brazil as Lingis poses a new range of questions and brings his extraordinary descriptive skills to bear on innocence and the love of crime, the relationships of beauty with lust and of joy with violence and violation. He explores the religion of animals, the force in blessings and in curses. When the sphere of work and reason breaks down, and in catastrophic events we catch sight of cosmic time, our anxiety is mixed with exhilaration and ecstasy. More than acceptance of death, can philosophy understand joy in dying? Haunting and courageous, Lingis's writing has generated intense interest and debate among gender and cultural theorists as well as philosophers, and Dangerous Emotions is certain to introduce his work to an ever broader circle of readers. Source: CUP

"Dangerous Emotions is a sustained philosophical, phenomenological, and personal series of reflections on the role of passions and emotions, visceral responses, and human reactions which bypass and surpass the role of reason. Lingis has a unique perspective, a position already well fortified in many texts he has published, whereby he blends elements of philosophical texts (most notably Heidegger, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Lévinas, and Neitzsche) with strange and intense experiences from everyday life across different geographies and cultures. He is clearly one of the most brilliant philosophers of his generation. His book explores those moments and events usually unnoticed by philosophy, which philosophy needs to address if it is to provide us with a way of understanding life and living it well."

—Elizabeth Grosz, author of Fluid Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism

Alphonso Lingis is Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University and author of Abuses (California, 1994), The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994), Foreign Bodies (1994), and other books.