John Llewelyn

John Llewelyn (1 February 1928 – 7 May 2021) was a Welsh-born British philosopher whose extensive body of work, published over a period of more than forty years, spans the divide between Analytical and Continental schools of contemporary thought.

He has conjoined the rigorous approach to matters of meaning and logic typical of the former and the depth and range of reference typical of the latter in a constructive and critical engagement with the work of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas.

Llewelyn was born in Rogerstone, near Newport, South Wales and educated at Rogerstone Elementary School and Bassaleg Grammar School.

After taking a degree in French at Aberystwyth University he went on to take an Honours degree in philosophy at Edinburgh University and pursue postgraduate studies in philosophy at Oxford.

He has held teaching posts at the University of New England, as reader in philosophy at Edinburgh University and as visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis and Loyola University Chicago.

A collegiate and enduring friendship with Derrida was established at their first meeting at the 1972 Cerisy-la-Salle décade on Nietzsche, an encounter that would lead to Llewelyn becoming one of the first Anglophone philosophers to engage constructively with Derrida's thought.

Llewelyn's 1986 Derrida on the Threshold of Sense contributed to a marked shift in the Anglo-American response to Derrida's work, up until then largely the province of literary and cultural theory.

Taking his point of departure from Derrida's last seminars on the animal and moving beyond Levinas's ethics of the Other, Llewelyn has elaborated a "metaphysics of singular responsibility" (1991: 172) which effects a deconstruction of the boundaries between the human and the non-human and, in challenging the anthropocentric bias of Levinas’s ethics, inaugurates a "widening of our conception of the ethical and the political toward the ecological", a "widening of the constituency of the other to whom I owe responsibility" (2012a: 1, 288).

In 1995 Llewelyn published the first systematic exposition and critical evaluation of the work of Emmanuel Levinas to appear in the English language.

The summary of the philosophical doctrines Levinas interrogates, presented in the introduction to that work (1995: 1–4) – Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger– is itself indicative of the depth of scholarship and range of reference Llewelyn marshals throughout his own later work which also has additional important points of reference in the work of Wittgenstein, Saussure, Peirce, J.L. Austin and Duns Scotus and a range of literary figures, notably Emily Dickinson, Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Rilke.

In conjunction with this undertaking Llewelyn develops a radicalised and enlarged concept of imagination as the "chief religious faculty", wherein religion is reconceptualised as, per se, the relation to the world as other and as such "is not dependent on, though not incompatible with, institutionalised religion or a certain traditional divinity" (2012b: 314; 2012a, 2009).