Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1996) has exerted a profound influence on 20th-century continental philosophy. This anthology, including Levinas's key philosophical texts over a period of more than forty years, provides an ideal introduction to his thought and offers insights into his most innovative ideas. Five of the ten essays presented here appear in English for the first time. An introduction by Adriaan Peperzak outlines Levinas's philosophical development and the basic themes of his writings. Each essay is accompanied by a brief introduction and notes. This collection is an ideal text for students of philosophy concerned with understanding and assessing the work of this major philosopher.

Levinas's idea of ethics as a relation of responsibility to others has become highly influential. Simon Critchley proposes a dramatic new way of reading Levinas's work, and provides a less familiar, more troubling, account of it. He argues that Levinas's fundamental problem was the attempt to escape the tragic fatality of Heidegger's philosophy.

"The best introduction available for students of one of the most important philosophers of this century."--"American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly." (Philosophy)

This work offers a new interpretation of what Levinas means when he says that we are infinitely responsible to the other person.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was a leading philosopher and Talmudic commentator. This book is a major collection of essays representing the culmination of Levinas's philosophy. It gathers his important work and reveals the development of his thought. It looks at issues of suffering, love, religion, culture, justice, human rights, and legal theory.

The thirteen essays collected in this volume investigate the possibility that the word "God" can be understood now, at the end of the twentieth century, in a meaningful way. Nine of the essays appear in English translation for the first time. Among Levinas's writings, this volume distinguishes itself, both for students of his thought and for a wider audience, by the range of issues it addresses. Levinas not only rehearses the ethical themes that have led him to be regarded as one of the most original thinkers working out of the phenomenological tradition, but he also takes up philosophical questions concerning politics, language, and religion. The volume situates his thought in a broader intellectual context than have his previous works. In these essays, alongside the detailed investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, Rosenzweig, and Buber that characterize all his writings, Levinas also addresses the thought of Kierkegaard, Marx, Bloch, and Derrida. Some essays provide lucid expositions not available elsewhere to key areas of Levinas's thought. "God and Philosophy" is perhaps the single most important text for understanding Levinas and is in many respects the best introduction to his works. "From Consciousness to Wakefulness" illuminates Levinas's relation to Husserl and thus to phenomenology, which is always his starting point, even if he never abides by the limits it imposes. In "The Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other," Levinas not only addresses Derrida's Speech and Phenomenon but also develops an answer to the later Heidegger's account of the history of Being by suggesting another way of reading that history. Among the other topics examined in the essays are the Marxist concept of ideology, death, hermeneutics, the concept of evil, the philosophy of dialogue, the relation of language to the Other, and the acts of communication and mutual understanding.

Emmanuel Levinas has come to be regarded as one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century European philosophy. Initially seen as an obscure popularizer of phenomenology, Levinas is now widely admired for his original philosophic writings on the encounter with "the other," his place in post-Holocaust Jewish philosophy, his influence on Derrida, and his powerful claims about the importance of ethics for philosophy and for human life generally. The past several years have seen an explosion of interest in his thought. Critics have charged, however, that his philosophy is seriously flawed by his failure to convey his understanding of ethical responsibility in a practical ethical theory. Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First defends Levinas against this criticism. In doing so, it develops an interpretation that stresses Levinas' sensitivity to the urgency of acting to help those who are vulnerable. The book departs from trends in Levinas scholarship. Many scholars emphasize Levinas' epistemological claims about the incomprehensibility and inexpressibility of the relation to the other as the foundational theses of his philosophy. By contrast, Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics shows how he reaches them based on a subtle analysis of the practical demands involved in recognizing responsibility for others. The book argues that Levinas is best read as pragmatic thinker, one who, above all, is concerned to stress the importance of practical effectiveness in serving the other. Finally, the book shows how his understanding of responsibility can be expressed in practical ethical theories given this pragmatic interpretation. This book is an important work for Levinas scholars, particularly those interested in his relevance for contemporary ethical debates and for social and political philosophy. The book develops an interpretation that avoids jargon, and new readers as well as readers interested in placing Levinas in dialogue with Anglo-American philosophy will find it a useful resource. The book's efforts to situate Levinas in relation to issues in analytic ethics, such as Rawls' theory of justice and debates over moral realism, will be of particular interest to the latter.