Albert William Levi and the moral imagination

Albert William Levi (1911--1988), an American philosopher of the humanities, lived an unheralded but significant philosophical life. He strove to preserve memory against historical forgetting, to cultivate integration despite cultural fragmentation, and to practice comprehensive thinking in an increasingly specialized age. Above all, he believed that the taught humanities must serve the lived humanities.;This is the first full length study of Levi's work. It examines his published and unpublished writings to construct an intellectual biography that accords with the organic development of his thought. It arrives at his final notion of the moral imagination as a consummatory notion that generates, draws, and shapes his philosophical life. Progressing through Levi's organon (logic and topics), thoughts on poetry and philosophy (philosophy of the imagination and literature), moral philosophy (ethics and politics), account of philosophical memory (philosophy of the humanities and culture), and philosophy of value (cultural axiology), this study considers his notion of the moral imagination in its concrete and theoretical dimensions as a producer of cultural images and as an integrative concept. It closes by evaluating how the moral imagination is essential to cultural making (poesis), education (paideia), and self-knowledge (the Delphic gnothi seauton).