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.
[3] 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[5] 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).