Glen A. Mazis

Glen Mazis was born in south New Jersey and grew up in New York City. He has a Ph. D. in philosophy from Yale university and has taught philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities for decades (L.S.U., Univ. of Illinois, No. KY Univ., Wesleyan Univ., St. Lawrence Univ., Soka Univ. and Penn State Harrisburg). He is also a poet, concerned about the planet, loves animals and the natural world, and seeks to live peacefully. He feels that the world of philosophy and poetry should come more into contact. Each needs the other to become vivid and robust--to help us see deeper into the pond of our lives. His work is about also bringing us back to embodiment--not the body as object, reviled or worshipped, but as being on the same level as the rest of the myriad beings on the planet and in glorious, sometimes exhilarating and sometimes painful, interchange and overlap. His newest book, Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World: Silence, Ethics, Imagination and Poetic ontology reinterprets Merleau-Ponty's work to articulate the nature of silence, show that there is an "ethics of felt solidarity: that is the necessary basis for more ethical principles to have meaning and efficacy, that there is another sort of imagination other than "make believe" that is necessary to bring out all the e=sense of perception and our embodied apprehension of the world, and the power of poetic language to manifest fully our being and the being of the world with which we are in dialogue.