Leonard Lawlor

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Leonard "Len" Lawlor (born November 2, 1954) is an American philosopher and the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in Continental philosophy from the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on phenomenology and the work of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Jean Hippolyte. He earned his PhD from SUNY Stony Brook in 1988 and taught at the University of Memphis from 1989 to 2008, serving as Faudree-Hardin University Professor of Philosophy from 2004 to 2008 before moving to Penn State. In 2002 he published Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, where he introduces the idea of "lifeism" — a unifying view among 20th-century continental philosophers that centers on life and death, drawing on Husserl's Erlebnis and Bergson's Élan vital; he later called this approach "neo-vitalism." His more recent work explores transcendental violence and how people can respond to it. His book From Violence to Speaking Out discusses responses to violence and develops an ethical approach, drawing on ideas from Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, and building on his earlier This Is Not Sufficient. He is married to Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor and has two children.