Despite claims that STS science education promotes ethical responsibility, this approach is not supported by a clear philosophy of ethics. This paper argues that the work of Emmanuel Levinas provides an ethics suitable for an STS science education. His concept of the face of the Other redefines education as learning from the other, rather than about the other. Extrapolating the face of the Other to the non‐human world suggests an ethics for science education where the goal of pedagogy is peace (...) with each other and the world through the rupture, eros and justice that arises from openness to the demands of the world. Understanding the infinite responsibility of the invocation presented by the face of the Other radically reconceptualizes science education from STS towards an E‐STS curriculum of responsiveness that critically employs the said of modern science and opportunities of experience to enable the next generation of citizens to act in peace to what the world is saying. (shrink)

The moral philosophy of Levinas offers a stark prospectus of impossibility for corporate ethics. It differs from most traditional ethical theories in that, for Levinas, the ethical develops in a personal meeting of one with the Other, rather than residing in some internal deliberation of the moral subject. Levinasian ethics emphasizes an infinite personal responsibility arising for each of us in the face of the Other and in the presence of the Third. It stresses the imperious demand we experience to (...) be open to, prepared for and impassioned with that which we may not know, or recognize, about ourselves or about the Other. Such a demand transcends our intellectual and/or rational potential; it involves us in a carnal and somatic bodily experience of otherness. If we are to speak of Levinasian ethics in a business context, it cannot be a matter of corporate ethics but only a matter of individual managerial ethics. What such an ethics would be like is yet to be outlined. This paper proposes a series of questions and suggestions that will explicate some key terms of a practice organized around a Levinasian vocabulary of otherness, responsibility, proximity, diachrony and justice. (shrink)

Realist and liberal understandings of ethics as the dominant approaches to ethics in international relations are unable to respond efficiently to the call of the other in the age of war against terrorism as they revolve around the needs and the interests of the self. Such self-centred understandings of ethics cannot respond to the other ethically and respect the other in its otherness. Therefore, in this work I attempt to develop responsive ethics by drawing on Levinasian ethics which can create (...) the possibilities of concrete non-violent responses to the other in the age of war against terrorism. (shrink)

This paper provides an exposition and critical assessment of a fundamental disagreement between Løgstrup’s and Levinas’s otherwise closely aligned ethical phenomenologies. The disagreement concerns the putative compatibility of ethics and ontology, where in stark contrast to Levinas’s ethics, which proceeds from a critique of the ‘primacy of ontology’ in Western thought, Løgstrup brands his own ethical project as ‘ontological ethics’. First, I provide an interpretation of Løgstrup’s ontological ethics, clarifying in particular the influence of hermeneutic and existential analysis on Løgstrup’s (...) methodology. Second, I bring Løgstrup’s ontological ethics into critical dialogue with Levinas’s thought. Here, I home in on two Levinas-style worries that appear to have traction against Løgstrup’s ontological ethics. However, ultimately, I argue that both can be defused. (shrink)

This paper addresses a growing concern within the medical humanities community regarding the perceived need for a more empathically-focused medical curricula, and advocates for the use of creative pedagogical forms as a means to attend to issues of suffering and relationality. Drawing from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I critique the notion of empathy on the basis that it erases difference and disregards otherness. Rather, I propose that the concept of empathy may be usefully replaced with that of ethical (...) responsibility , which suggests a shared sense of humanity outside the boundaries of presumed knowledge of the other. To illustrate this argument, I theorize the importance of theater within medical education. Theater, I argue, may engender ethical responsibility in the Levinasian sense, and thus may allow learners to differently engage with the experience of the suffering other. As such, I examine Margaret Edson’s widely used play Wit as a platform for such an ethical encounter to occur. Thus, rather than working to understand the value of theater in medical education in terms of knowledge and skill acquisition, I theorize that its primacy within medical curricula arises from its ethical/relational potential , or potential to engender new forms of inter-human relationality. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the metaphysical ethics of Emmanuel Levinas captures some essential moral intuitions that are central to health care. However, there is an ongoing discussion about the relevance of ethical metaphysics for normative ethics and in particular on the question of the relationship between justice and individualized care. In this paper I take part in this debate and I argue that Levinas' idea of an ethics of the Other that guides politics and justice can shed important (...) light on issues that are central to priorities in health care. In fact, the ethics of Levinas in seeking the foundation of normativity itself, captures the ethical coreand central values of health care. (shrink)

This paper investigates the possibility of understanding the rudimentary elements of clinical sensitivity by investigating the works of Edmund Husserl and Emmanuel Levinas on sensibility. Husserl's theory of intentionality offers significant reflections on the role of pre-reflective and affective intuition as a condition for intentionality and reflective consciousness. These early works of Husserl, in particular his works on the constitution of phenomenological time and subjective time-consciousness, prove to be an important basis for Levinas’ works on an ethics of alterity and (...) infinite responsibility for the other person. In fact, it is difficult to understand the core of Levinasian ethics, of vulnerability as proximity, of ethical sensitivity as passivity and a suffering for the suffering of another, without understanding the influence from Husserl's work. Crucially, the paper will, on the basis of Levinasian ethics, establish an understanding of sensibility as vulnerability and receptivity that is fundamental also for understanding significant intuitions in clinical nursing. Clinical sensitivity and carefulness in nursing are shaped by the concrete and also bodily expressions of vulnerabilities in a receptivity that is pre-reflective and pre-ontological. (shrink)

This special issue contains papers first presented at a conference that was held 14–16 May 2008 at the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy at the University of Leicester. Each of the papers takes up ideas from the works of Jacques Derrida and seeks to apply these to questions of business, ethics and business ethics. The papers take up quite different parts of Derrida's works, from his work on the animal, narrative and story, the violence of codification and the limits (...) of responsibility to the aporias of decision. As a whole, the papers offer a dangerous gift to business ethics, of which the stakes are here laid bare – if business ethics is to shrug off its philosophical immaturity and take seriously the work of major European thinkers such as Derrida, then many of its assumed categories, concepts and practices will be shown to shudder and tremble, as it becomes possible to demonstrate how they, one by one, unhinge themselves. (shrink)

This paper considers concepts of expectation and responsibility, and how these drive dialogic interactions between tutor and student in an age of marketised Higher Education. In thinking about such interactions in terms of different forms of exchange, the paper considers the philosophy of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas on dialogic intersubjectivity, and an ethics of responsibility. This enables a richer understanding of the tutorial dialogue in particular, as both teaching and encounter. This has significant implications for education and for the (...) idea of the tutorial as a space for encounter with the other through language. The paper argues that the university tutorial, rather than being considered a place only for the meeting of expectations, might be envisioned as a space for encounter with the unexpected. In considering the nature of the educational encounter in relation to an example from the film adaptation of Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’, the paper concludes that the tutorial opens up the possibility for a mutual encounter with otherness. This positions the tutorial as a space of educational otherness—a Foucauldian heterotopia which rejects the expectation-bound economy of exchange, and which offers instead the possibility of an education marked by an economy of excess. (shrink)