The originality of Glenberg's theoretical account lies in the claim that memory works in the service of physical interaction with the three-dimensional world. Little consideration is given, however, to the role of memory in action. We present and discuss data on spatial memory for action. These empirical data constitute the first step of reasoning about the link between memory and action, and allow several aspects of Glenberg's theory to be tested.
When used alongside "The Blackwell Guide to the Modern Philosophers" (2001), these volumes provide students of modern philosophy with an ideal combination of ...
The controversial case of Terri Schiavo came to a close on March 31, 2005, with her death following the removal of a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube. This event followed years of controversy and social upheaval. Voices from across the entire political and cultural spectrums filled the airwaves and op-ed pages of major newspapers. Protests ensued outside of Ms. Schiavo’s care facility. Ms. Schiavo’s parents published videos of their daughter on the internet in an effort to prove that she was not (...) in a vegetative state and could potentially recover. There is a certain mystery to the entire controversy given the fact that, legally, it was largely a matter of settled law. Precedent cases and legal statutes clearly set out the proper procedures and decisions to be followed in this case. Nonetheless, powerful challenges and virulent opposition to these standards arose. Through an investigation of this case as well as a comparative study of the case of Dax Cowart (in particular, the documentary depictions of Dax Cowart’s case) and of a photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin, I plan to investigate the source of these social upheavals and hypothesize that they were largely the result of a phenomenological reaction to the human face. (shrink)
Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) is at the center of the renewed debate over the question of the ethical. In the context of the phenomenological tradition, Levinas defines ethics as an originary response to the face of the other. Between 1982 and 1992, Levinas gave numerous interviews, closing a distinguished sixty-year career. Of the twenty interviews collected in this volume, seventeen appear in English for the first time. In the interviews Levinas sets forth the central features of his ethical philosophy. He (...) underlies his dedication to the phenomenological search for the concrete and the nonformal signification of alterity. He also elaborates on issues that do not receive extensive treatment in his formal philosophical works, including the question of pre-philosophical experiences, the ethical signification of money, justice, and the State. The informality of the interviews prompt Levinas to address matters about which he is reticent in his published works. (shrink)
Critics of Levinas reject the notion that the abstract face of the other can ground ethics and generate specific responsibilities. To the contrary, I argue that the face does ground a practical and pragmatic ethics. Drawing on Levinas' phenomenological analyses of the enjoying subject, I show that the face communicates an imperative to the subject that obligates her or him to repair the concrete context of action in which the subject encounters the other. My elucidation takes very seriously the notion (...) that the face speaks and the face is a body. When coupled with a pragmatic account of communication, Levinas gives us a robust elucidation of the phenomenological and pragmatic dimensions of ethical responsibility. Key Words: embodiment • ethics • face • Emmanuel Levinas • phenomenology • pragmatics • responsibility. (shrink)
: Emmanuel Levinas compares ethical responsibility to a maternal body who bears the Other in the same without assimilation. In explicating this trope, he refers to a biblical passage in which Moses is like a "wet nurse" bearing Others whom he has "neither conceived nor given birth to" (Num. 11:12). A close reading of this passage raises questions about ethics, maternity, and sexual difference, for both the concept of ethical substitution and the material practice of mothering.
From the relative obscurity in which Levinas's work languished until very recently, Emmanuel Levinas must now be judged as one of the most influential figures in contemporary Continental philosophy. There is no better guide than John Lewelyn to lead one through the thickets of Levinas's prose. Bursting with questions, multiple references, cascading citations and multilingual puns and nuances, this book is the compelling record of intellectual obsession. Taking as its guiding thre the theme of genealogy, the book gives a (...) broadly chronological and impressively manageable presentation of the whole sweep of the Levinas's work. Balanced and finely grained, Llewelyn confronts questions of method, Heidegger, phenomenology, the theme of sensibility, religion, enjoyment, feminity, eros, justice and the political. The book reaches a stunning climax in a series of chapters that give a hestitant but tolerant discussion of the question of God in Levinas, the relation to Levinasian ethics to Nietzschean genealogy, and an extraordinary discussion of metaphor that leads into a wholly original analysis of Levinas's poetics and metaphorics. The book concludes with a sensitive reading of the autobiographical epigraphs to Levinas's Otherwise than Being... and a consideration of the Holocaust. (shrink)
For Emmanuel Levinas objectivity is intersubjectively constituted. But this intersubjectivity is not, as in Merleau-Ponty, the intercorporeality of perceivers nor, as in Heidegger, the active correlation of practical agents. It has an ethical structure; it is the presence, to each cognitive subject, of others who contest and judge him. But does not the exposure of each cognitive subject to the wants and needs of others result in the constitution of a common practical field, which is not yet the objective (...) world of scientific cognition? For Levinas, the constitution of a world common to all is governed by the practice of justice. Justice begins when above the elf and the other there intervenes a third party, who contests and judges both. But whether this third party is a representative of humanity, or a figure of God, would not his justice be but the name of a higher egoism? (shrink)
Eva Buddeberg: Verantwortung im Diskurs: Grundlinien einer rekonstruktiv-hermeneutischen Konzeption moralischer Verantwortung im Anschluss an Hans Jonas, Karl-Otto Apel und Emmanuel Lévinas Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-2 DOI 10.1007/s10677-012-9366-3 Authors Norbert Anwander, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Philosophie, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany Journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice Online ISSN 1572-8447 Print ISSN 1386-2820.
The Face of the Other and the Trace of God contain essays on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and how his philosophy intersects with that of other philosophers, particularly Husserl, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Derrida. This collection is broadly divided into two parts: relations with the other, and the questions of God.
Ethics as First Philosophy brings together original essays by an outstanding group of international scholars that discuss the work of Emmanuel Levinas. The book explores the significance of Levinas' work for philsophy, psychology and religion. Ethics as First Philosophy comprises an excellent collection of work on this major contemporary thinker. The book presents Levinas philosophy from a wide and well-balanced variety of perspectives. The contributions range from thematic discussions of Levinas central concepts to explorations of his affinities and differences (...) with other key writers such as Kant, Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Blanchot and Derrida. Some of the authors focus on the religious and philosophical issues presented by Levinas while others analyze the role of Levinas within phenomenology in or within recent French philosophy. (shrink)
Edith Wyschogrod presents the first full-length study in English of the important contemporary French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. It is a revision of the author’s earlier study and includes discussions of his recent writings as well as current scholarship. Dr. Wyschogrod’s extensive discussion of Levinas's relation to Judaism, especially his use of literature from the Torah and other religious writings, will be of interest to religious scholars. The author compares Levinas’s thought with that of his contemporaries, most notably Jacques Derrida (...) and Husserl. (shrink)
Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, two twentieth-century Jewish philosophers and two extremely provocative thinkers whose reputations have grown considerably over the last twenty years, are rarely studied together. This is due to the disparate interests of many of their intellectual heirs. Strauss has influenced political theorists and policy makers on the right while Levinas has been championed in the humanities by different cadres associated with postmodernist thought. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation, (...) Leora Batnitzky brings together these two seemingly incongruous contemporaries, demonstrating that they often had the same philosophical sources and their projects had many formal parallels. While such a comparison is valuable in itself for better understanding each figure, it also raises profound questions in the current debate on the definitions of 'religion', suggesting new ways that religion makes claims on both philosophy and politics. (shrink)
Emmanuel Lévinas est indiscutablement le philosophe par excellence de l’éthique. L’un des thèmes majeurs de sa pensée, ou plutôt la clé pour comprendre son œuvre -- qui se situe aux frontières de nombreux domaines --, est la responsabilité à l’égard d’Autrui. Cet article se propose de reconsidérer cet aspect déterminant de ses écrits au regard de l’individualisme contemporain. Nous montronsqu’en aucune façon l’éthique lévinassienne de la responsabilité n’oblitère «la part du Moi dans l’eminence de l’Autre». Bien au contraire, dans (...) l’ouverture à l’altérité, le Moi s’y trouve pleinement reconnu. Autrement dit notre thèse est que le préjugé selon lequella philosophie de Lévinas consiste en une interprétation normative de la condition qui conduit au sacrifice de soi est imputable à un malentendu lié au caractère polysémique et ambivalent du concept d’individualisme.Emmanuel Levinas is unquestionably the philosopher of ethics par excellence. One of the major themes of his thought, or rather the key to understanding his work-work that spans over many fields-is one’s responsibility toward the Other. This article attempts to reconsider this determining aspect of his writings from the perspective of contemporary individualism. We argue that Levinas’s ethics of responsibility in no way obliterates “the share of the Ego in the eminence of the Other.” On the contrary, in his approach to otherness, he takes the Self entirely into account. In other words, our interpretation is that the commonly held view that Levinas’s philosophy consists of normative interpretation of the human condition leading to the sacrifice of the self is imputable to a misunderstanding caused by the polysemous and ambivalent character of the concept of individualism. (shrink)
In 1982 the American philosopher and Levinas scholar Edith Wyschogrod conducted an interview with Emmanuel Levinas, the transcript of which she published seven years later. Early in the interview, Wyschogrod proposed to Levinas that his philosophy constituted a radical break with western theological tradition because it started not with a Parmenidean ontological plenitude, but rather with the God of the Hebrew Bible. The God Levinas began with, according to Wyschogrod, wasan indigent God, a hidden God who commands that there (...) be a world apart from God, because God needs the multiplicity of the world in order for there to be justice. Levinas responds to this proposal: That’s quite right. Justice, I call it responsibility for the other, right? There is even in Totality and Infinity, the evocation of the tzimtzum [the idea in kabbalistic writings of the self-contraction of God in order to create the void in which creation can take place], but I won’t venture into that. (shrink)
This paper explores Emmanuel Levinas' Jewish writings, and in particular, his Talmudic commentaries and essays on Judaism. The aim is to elicit some salient features of his methodological approach to the Jewish sacred texts. In general, Levinas' specific reflections on method (in terms of reading the Jewish Scriptures) are confined to sporadic, fragmentary comments interspersed throughout his writings. In extracting these reflections, a specifically Levinasian approach emerges. In particular, his approach shows how one may ethically encounter the Other(s) in (...) these sacred texts. (shrink)
This paper concerns the possibility of “thinking” God, and uses the work of Emmanuel Levinas to frame a contemporary approach to some of the problems involved. The difficult relationship between philosophy and Christian theology is noted, before Levinas’s thought is examined as it relates to that which both marks consciousness and exceeds it. Levinas’s adoption of the “idea of the Infinite” and hisexploration of two ways in which the Infinite might signify (have meaning) open up a useful trajectory for (...) a thought of God which is not reductive. At the same time, however, this aporetic approach raises difficulties in the context of specific religious traditions. Three problems as they occur for Christian theology are examined in the light of Levinas’s work: the problem of not being able to identify an experience of God as such; the problem of the infinite interpretability of revelation; and the problem of understanding the divinity of Jesus Christ. (shrink)
This paper examines the extent to which certain aspects of the philosophies of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jean-Luc Marion are directed toward the divine, especially in regard to how they employ religious imagery or even explicitly biblical metaphors, namely those of the face of the neighbor, the glory of the Infinite, the response of the witness, and the breaking or sharing of bread. This will show important parallels and connections between their respective works, but it will also highlight where they (...) diverge from each other. In respect to all four symbols or (biblical) images, I suggest that while it is indeed one (or even the primary) goal of Marion’s work to open phenomenological discourse to enable talk about the divine, Lévinas is instead interested in emptying biblical language of its theological import for purely philosophical (or ethical) purposes. (shrink)
Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) was one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. His work influencing a wide range of intellectuals such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Jean-Luc Marion.
This article argues that the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas does not fall into the categories of postmodern thought; rather, it represents a fundamentally Jewish way of thinking that, in many ways, is opposed to postmodernism. The paper begins with a consideration of what makes Jewish thought Jewish and explains how and why the thinking of Levinas is defined by distinctively Jewish categories. It addresses his stance toward Torah and other sacred Jewish texts, as well as his view of creation (...) and the Creator. After establishing what makes Jewish thought Jewish, the text examines three key concepts in the philosophy of Levinas and explains how and why these concepts are distinctively Jewish: they are the concepts of the holy, of the face, and of time. Finally, drawing upon the Hebrew language and sacred texts, the paper shows that these key concepts distinguish Levinas as a Jewish thinker whose views fall firmly within the Jewish tradition. /// O presente artigo defende, antes de mais, que a filosofia de Emmanuel Levinas de forma alguma se pode reduzir às categorias do pensamento pós-moderno; pelo contrário, o autor pretende demonstrar até que ponto este é um modo fundamentalmente judaico de pensar, um pensamento que, de diversos modos, se opõe ao assim chamado pós-modemismo. O artigo começa por estabelecer aquilo que faz com que de um determinado pensamento se possa dizer que ele é de matriz judaica, explicando assim também de que modo o pensamento de Levinas está definido por categorias distintamente judaicas. O artigo considera a posição do filósofo em relação à Tora e outros textos sagrados do Judaísmo, bem como a sua interjiretação da criação e do Criador. Assim, depois de estabelecer aquilo que faz com que seja propriamente judaico o pensamento judaico, o texto examina três dos conceitos fundamentais na filosofia de Levinas e explica porque é que estes conceitos são, de facto, tipicamente judaicos. Trata-se, com efeito, dos conceitos de Santo, de Rosto, e de Tempo. Finalmente, argumentando a partir da língua hebraica e dos textos sagrados, o artigo reafirma de que modo estes conceitos-chave distinguem Levinas como pensador cujas interpretações se inserem, sem mais, dentro da tradição judaica. (shrink)
Abstract In this article, I attempt to trace Emmanuel Levinas's notion of transcendence and its relation to infinity to his Talmudic lectures to offer both a philosophical diagnosis as well as a counter to the essentialist logic of what Levinas considers the traditional or ?metaphysical? concept of time. This opens my speculative argument up to two levels of interpretation as it requires an historical investigation into the cultural context that conditioned Levinas's particular understanding of transcendence and infinity in relation (...) to his turn toward Talmud and sacred Jewish texts in the years following World War Two. But it also requires that we take seriously the critique of history as inadequate to such a task that is inherent in Levinas's presentation of these concepts. All of this hinges on the role and place of ?time? in Levinas. I consider Levinas's category of ?time immemorial? as a counter to the essentialist logic of what Levinas considers the traditional or ?metaphysical? concept of time which I claim is at the core of the ?realist? attitude toward the practice of history founded upon the categories of agency, experience, memory, testimony, and most recently the importance of ?presence?. This in turn leads me to propose two possible alternatives, through Freud and Derrida, that conserve Levinas's critique of the essentialist understanding of time uncoupled from any transcendent or theological mechanism. (shrink)
Considering world problems in a context of inter human relationship, I refer to the approach developed in Emmanuel Levinas' ethics. This approach encourages raising a question about the potential usefulness of knowledge in solving problems of human relationship. The fundamental trait of the human condition face-toface with the other is, according to Levinas, unrestricted responsibility of the I about the other. The other has ethical, not ontological, authority, which explains why observable deafness to one's responsibility can not serve as (...) a proof against its absolute nature. Consequently, whatever one's judgement on the current situation, moral requirements are valid. The relationship between the I and the other comes before any theory and there is no need for the help of knowledge. However, the multiplicity of human beings demands a solution to problems involving many people. There arises a need for theoretical thought—its aim is to pose a question of justice. Ethical knowledge for Levinas is primary. Ethically motivated thought can seek knowledge as received from the other. Such knowledge can help to conceive of just action, if there is a wish to perform it. But it is not knowledge that motivates one to act morally and it is not argument that can convince one to act this way. (shrink)
Levinas seamlessly unites philosophy and religion via ethics. By doing so he satisfies philosophy's quest for justification by finding it neither in epistemology nor aesthetics (nor in an escapist "fundamentalism") but in the responsibility of each person for each other and for all others. That is to say, the "ground" of meaning emerges neither in intellect nor imagination but in the moral responsibilities one person has for another and, beyond these already infinite obligations, in the justice - law and equality (...) - that such responsibilities require and engender. All of this is at the same time a consistent expression, indeed a profoundly mature expression of the ethical monotheist vision of traditional rabbinic Judaism and of non-mythological religious consciousness more generally. /// O pensamento de Emmanuel Levinas induz uma união perfeita entre Filosofia e Religião mediante a Ética. Nesta medida, o filósofo dá resposta à pergunta da Filosofia pela sua própria justificação, justificação essa que ele não encontra nem na epistemologia nem na estética (nem em qualquer forma de escapismo fundamentalista), mas na responsabilidade de cada pessoa por cada um e por todos. Or a isto equivale a dizerque o "fundamento" para o sentido não emerge nem do intelecto nem da imaginação, mas sim da responsabilidade moral que nos obriga a cada um diante dos outros e, para lá destas obrigações infinitas, nos compromete com a justiça - representada no princípio da legalidade e da equidade - requerida e engendrada por essas mesmas responsabilidades. Tudo isto, para o autor, é ao mesmo tempo expressão consistente, de facto, uma expressão profundamente madura da visão ética monoteísta do Judaísmo rabínico e, de uma forma mais geral, de toda a forma de consciência religiosa não mitológica. (shrink)
DISSERTAÇÃO DE MESTRADO MOREIRA, Ubiratan Nunes. Dizer profético e Eleição : a hermenêutica da religião como ética em Emmanuel Lévinas. 2012. 136 folhas. Dissertação (Mestrado) – Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais, Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciências da Religião, Belo Horizonte.
Ch. 1: Inadequate approaches to the question of God -- 1.1. Initial clarifications -- 1.2 Wholly unsystematic direct approaches -- 1.3. Semi-systematic indirect approaches -- 1.4. A wholly anti-systematic, anti-theoretical, and direct approach: Ludwig Wittgenstein -- 1.5. A characteristic example of a failed critique: Thomas Nagel's objections to God as "last point" -- Ch. 2. Heidegger's thinking of Being: the flawed development of a significant approach -- 2.1. Heidegger's failed and distorting interpretation and critique of the Christian metaphysics of Being (...) -- 2.2. Heidegger's four approaches to "retrieving" the "question of being" -- 2.3. What is unthought in Heidegger's thinking of Being I: Being-as-Ereignis -- 2.4. What is unthought in Heidegger's "thinking of Being" II: Being and being(s)- Ereignis and Ereignete(s) -- 2.5. The "overcoming [Überwinding] of metaphysics" as "transformational recovering [Verwindung]" of metaphysics and "the end of the history of Being" -- 2.6. The status of Heideggerian thinking I: thinking of Being as thinking within Ereignis, thinking that reaches its destination with Ereignis (Denken, das in das Ereignis einkehrt) -- 2.7. The status of Heideggerian thinking II: absolute claim, provisionality, the poverty of language, the language of thinking, the finitude of thinking -- 2.8. Heidegger's thinking and the topic "God" -- 2.9. Heidegger's "thinking": a fundamentally deficient and confused form of thinking -- Ch. 3:The structural-systematic approach to a theory of Being and God -- 3.1. The systematic context: the theoretical framework of the structural-systematic philosophy -- 3.2. The unrestricted universe of discourse as the universal dimension of primordial Being -- 3.3. Explication of the dimension of Being I: theory of Being as such -- 3.4. Explication of the dimension of Being II: theory of Being as a whole -- 3.5. Explication of the relation between absolutely necessary Being and the contingent dimension of Being as key to a conception of absolutely necessary Being as minded (as personal) -- 3.6. Absolutely necessary minded (personal) Being as creator of the world (as absolute creating) -- 3.7. The clarified relation between Being and God and the task of developing an integral theory about God -- Ch. 4: Critical examination of two counterpositions: Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion -- 4.1. Levinas's misguided conception of transcendence "beyond B/being" -- 4.2. Jean-Luc Marion's failed conception of "radical and non-metaphysical transcendence" and of "God without Being". (shrink)
The natural world’s myriad differences from human beings, and its apparent indifference to human purposes and ends, are often regarded as problems an environmental ethics must overcome. Perhaps, though, ecological ethics might instead be re-envisaged as a form of other-directed concern that responds to just this situation. That is, the recognition of worldly (in)difference might actually be regarded as a precondition for, and opening on, any contemporary ethics, whether human or ecological. What is more, the task of ethics might be (...) regarded as one of conserving (at least some) such differences. The work of Iris Murdoch and the “difference ethics” of Emmanuel Levinas seem to offer possible ways to express such understandings. However, their ecological potential and theoretical limits, especially in terms oftheir metaphysical presuppositions, remain relatively under-explored. A closer examination of their work is presented in order to illustrate some of the possibilities and difficulties facing an ecological form of difference ethics. (shrink)
Machine generated contents note: 1. An Ethical Transcendental Philosophy 1 -- 2. Beyond Being. Ontology and Eschatology in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas 33 -- 3. The Rationality of the Philosophy of Levinas 56 -- 4. Levinas on Substitution 83 -- 5. Judaism and Hellenism in the Philosophy of Levinas and Heidegger 101 -- 6. Ontological Difference (Heidegger) and Ontological Separation (Levinas) 115 -- 7. Enmity, Friendship, Corporeality 133 -- 8. The Rationality of Transcendence 147 -- 9. Levinas on (...) Theology and the Philosophy of Religion 169. (shrink)
The present paper aims to view three ways of thinking time by Emmanuel Levinas. We distinguish existential, historical, and eschatological time demonstrating how they are connected with his central notion of responsibility toward the Other. The following analysis reorders and interprets what Levinas has said in response of Martin Heidegger’s and Hegel’s position. The text does not make any other claims but aims to offer a possible reading and exegesis of Levinas’s philosophy and open a further discussion on these (...) topics. (shrink)
This work explains how human beings can live more peacefully with one another by understanding the conditions of possibility for dialogue. Philosophically, this challenge is articulated as the problem of: how dialogue as dia-logos is possible when the shared logos is precisely that which is in question. Emmanuel Levinas, in demonstrating that the shared logos is a function of interhuman relationship, helps us to make some progress in understanding the possibilities for dialogue in this situation. If the terms of (...) the argument to this point are taken largely from Levinas's 1961 Totality and Infinity, Dudiak further proposes that Levinas's 1974 Otherwise than Being can be read as a deepening of these earlier analyses, delineating, both the conditions of possibility and impossibility for discourse itself. Throughout these analyses Dudiak discovers that in Levinas's view dialogue is ultimately possible, only for a gracious subjectivity already graced by God by way of the other, but where the word God is inseparable from my subjectivity as graciousness to the other. Finally, for Levinas, the facilitation of dialogue, the facilitation of peace, comes down to the subject's capacity and willingness to be who he or she is, to take the beautiful risk of a peaceful gesture offered to the other, and that peace, in this gesture itself. As Levinas himself puts it: "Peace then is under my responsibility. I am a hostage, for I am alone to wage it, running a fine risk, dangerously." Levinas's philosophical discourse is precisely itself to be read as such a gesture. (shrink)
Being and God: A Systematic Approach in Confrontation with Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion , by Lorenz B. Puntel Content Type Journal Article Pages 164-165 Authors Christina M. Gschwandtner, University of Scranton Journal Comparative and Continental Philosophy Online ISSN 1757-0646 Print ISSN 1757-0638 Journal Volume Volume 4 Journal Issue Volume 4, Number 1 / 2012.
In this article, I compare and contrast the phenomenological ethics of Emmanuel Levinas with that of twentieth-century Japanese philosopher, Kuki Shūzō. In the resulting counterpoint, I put special emphasis on the conception of time espoused by each author. I argue that both go astray by mistakenly basing their ethics on the complete otherness of the other (diachrony) rather than recognizing that both the other (diachrony) and I (synchrony) are originally inseparable in experience before the conceptual separation of “me” and (...) “you.” The fetishization of otherness, which is associated with the feminine in the ethics of both philosophers, leads them to overlook how the details of our everyday concrete experience can provide a guide for action. This paper also explores the two East Asian ethical ideals that Kuki proposes–the Buddhist ideal and the ideal of bushidō, the code of the samurai warrior. In his ethics, Kuki prefers the ethics of bushidō to that of Buddhism. I explain how Kuki’s misunderstanding of Buddhism leads him to this choice, and I explore what he overlooked in Buddhist ethics. (shrink)
This essay studies the unfolding of Levinas' concept of transcendence from 1935 to his 1984 talk entitled "Transcendence and Intelligibility." I discuss how Levinas frames transcendence in light of enjoyment, shame, and nausea in his youthful project of a counter-ontology to Heidegger's Being and Time. In Levinas' essay, transcendence is the human urge to get out of being. I show the ways in which Levinas' early ontology is conditioned by historical circumstances, but I argue that its primary aim is formal (...) and phenomenological; it adumbrates formal structures of human existence. Levinas' 1940s ontology accentuates the dualism in being, between what amount to a light and a dark principle. This shift in emphasis ushers in a new focus for transcendence, which is now both sensuous and temporal, thanks to the promise of fecundity. Totality and Infinity (1961) pursues a similar onto-logic, while shifting the locus of transcendence to a non-sexuate other. The final great work, Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence (1974) offers a hermeneutic phenomenology of transcendence-in-immanence. It rethinks Husserl's focus on the transcendence of intentionality and its condition of possibility in the passive synthesis of complex temporality. If the 1974 strategy 'burrows beneath' the classical phenomenological syntheses, it also incorporates unsuspected influences from French psychology and phenomenology. This allows Levinas to develop a philosophical conception of transcendence that is neither Husserl's intentionality nor Heidegger's temporal ecstases, in what amounts to an original contribution to a phenomenology both hermeneutic and descriptive. (shrink)
Without a doubt, Levinas' principal concern in philosophy is how the self meets the Other. His magnum opus, Totality and Infinity, bears the subtitle, An Essay on Exterior- ity. Exteriority refers to a region beyond the horizons of the self, that which "is" beyond transcendental subjectivity. If there are such "beings" as other selves, that is, other subjects, they exist out there in the exterior. But if knowledge is confined to the interior—as Levinas says it must be—then the Other cannot (...) be known. He writes, "There is in knowledge, in the final account, an impossibility of escaping the self; hence sociality cannot have the same structure as knowledge" (EI 60). (shrink)
Most readers believe that it is difficult, verging on the impossible, to extract concrete prescriptions from the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Although this view is largely correct, Levinas’ philosophy can, with some assistance, generate specific duties on the part of legal actors. In this paper, I argue that the fundamental premises of Levinas’ theory of justice can be used to construct a prohibition against capital punishment. After analyzing Levinas’ concepts of justice, responsibility, and interruption, I turn toward his scattered (...) remarks on legal institutions, arguing that they enable a sense of interruption specific to the legal domain. It is here that we find the conceptual resources most important to my Levinasian abolition. I argue that the interruption of legal justice by responsibility implies what I call the principle of revisability. The principle of revisability states a necessary condition of just legal institutions: To be just, legal institutions must ensure the possibility of revising any and all of their rules, principles, and judgments. From this, the argument against capital punishment easily follows. Execution is a legal act, perhaps the only legal act, that cannot be undone. An application of the principle of revisability to this fact leads to the conclusion that legal institutions cannot justly impose capital punishment. After defending these points at length, I conclude with some observations on the consequences of the principle of revisability for law more generally. (shrink)
This paper considers three essential gestures in Levinas’s theology, highlighting in each case how Levinas’s thinking allows him to either incorporate or sidestep some of the fiercest modern criticisms of traditional theism. First, we present Levinas’s vision of divine transcendence, outlining his ontological atheism and explaining how this obviates proving the existence of God and avoids the tangles of traditional theodicy. Second, we describe Levinas’s idea of the trace, showing how a nonexistent God still leaves its mark in the face (...) of the other person and explaining how this vision of divine immanence accords with the agendas of thinkers such as Feuerbach and Nietzsche, who criticized theology that elevated God while debasing humanity. Third, we present Levinas’s insistence on the philosophical primacy of ethics, showing how he infuses his ethical philosophy with religious themes, elevating moral philosophy to the level of ultimate concern in a way that even atheist social theoris. (shrink)
The paper argues that everyday ethical expertise requires an openness to an experience of self-doubt very different from that involved in becoming expert in other skills—namely, an experience of profound vulnerability to the Other similar to that which Emmanuel Levinas has described. Since the experience bears a striking resemblance to that of undergoing cross-examination by Socrates as depicted in Plato’s early dialogues, I illustrate it through a close reading of the Euthyphro, arguing that Euthyphro’s vaunted “expertise” conceals a reluctance (...) to submit himself to the basic process of self-redefinition that results from learning the limits of one’s knowledge. I show how the dialogue itself models the disruptive experience of selfquestioning that leads to moral maturity, providing further evidence that expertise has an important non-cognitive element, as well as casting doubt on the ethical value of seeking “definitions” of the virtues. (shrink)
This book explores Levinas's rethinking of the meaning of ethics, justice and the human from a position that affirms but goes beyond the anti-humanist philosophy of the twentieth century.
In this article, I re-evaluate critiques of Levinas's Eurocentrism by exploring his openness to decolonial theory. First, I survey Levinas's conceptual confrontation with imperialism, showing that his early Eurocentric work (1930s-1960s) is revised in his later writing (1970s-1980s). Second, I explore the contextual reasons that led him to take that path, such as his previously overlooked conversations with the liberationist South American intellectual Enrique Dussel. Finally, I present the case for a revisitation of the current theoretical frameworks of Jewish thought. (...) I explain how Levinas's encounter with Third World discourses helps to add a needed decolonial layer to contemporary Jewish intercultural conversations. (shrink)
Introduction : but is it ethics? -- Alterity : the problem of transcendence -- Singularity : the unrepresentable face -- Responsibility : the infinity of the demand -- Ethics : normativity and norms -- Scarce resources? : Levinas, animals, and the environment -- Failures of recognition and the recognition of failure : Levinas and identity politics.
True Bergsonianism : beginnings of a philosopher -- The controversy over intersubjectivity -- Nazism and crisis : the interruption of a trajectory -- Totaliter aliter : revelation in interwar thought -- Levinas's discovery of the other in the making of French existentialism -- The ethical turn : philosophy and Judaism in the Cold War.
This paper aims to offer a new and alternative perspective on the basic idea of Levinas’s philosophy. My claim is that the latter can be more appropriately understood not as a contribution to a new way of thinking about ethics or the realm of the ethical as such, but rather toward the theory of normativity. The goal of Levinas’s reflections on alterity is to exhibit the normativity that is in play in all modes of understanding. Levinas tries to understand how (...) intentional beings are normatively bound by one another. This paper tries to give answers to the questions of (1) why Levinas addresses questions of alterity, (2) what is distinctive about these questions according to his way of thinking, and (3) why one should consider Levinas’ thought from the perspective of the articulation of a theory of normativity. (shrink)
To what extent can business ethics be hospitable to Levinasian ethics? This paper raises questions about how business ethics relates to its guests, in this case the guest called Levinas; the idea of introducing or inviting the work of an author into a field, as its guest, is by no means a simple problem of transference. For Jacques Derrida, there is hospitality only when the stranger's introduction to our home is totally unconditional. Such a conceptualization of hospitality becomes even more (...) demanding when the stranger that is near our home is an ethics also demanding hospitality, such as the ethics proposed by Levinas. An invitation puts in place particular circumstances that allow only for an arrival of the one invited. These conditions precede the so-called stranger, thereby predetermining the route to be taken, the destination to be reached and the correct manner of self-presentation. An invitation already reduces the Other to that which is expected by the inviter, that is to the Same. The hospitality of the field of business ethics becomes an endorsement of a particular version of the stranger, therefore recognizable by the field. Perhaps conceptualizing Levinasian ethics as an ethics that cannot be invited might protect it from procedures that reduce the strangeness of the stranger, making it knowable. That is the argument presented in this paper. (shrink)
The notion of face, referring to the other's manifestation in Levinas's philosophy, does not imply any visibility, but rather signifies a proximity affecting me before any representation. In Levinas's text one can read a great number of statements about the face as not being in the world but as coming from outside to disturb it, to intrude on it. The experience of face is nevertheless made concrete in a phenomenological sense, thanks to somefigures as the stateless' or the refugee's for (...) instance, which are also to be found in Arendt. However, interpreting such a kind at the center of politics, whereas Levinas wants to go through the world in order to thrill the forgotten experience of proximity which is the source of hospitality. This paper argues that Levinas questions a notion of world which is not Arendt's and that, from Arendt's point of view, the disclosure of the Who, necessarily implying the world, is not exactly a visibility. (shrink)
Le projet d'E. Lévinas — manifester l'intelligibilité de la transcendance — le conduit à rencontrer, comme une figure exemplaire, l'expression cartésienne de l'extérionté, le thème de l'idée de l'infini. Jusqu'où va cette similitude ? Selon Lévinas, la responsabilité — pour autrui — inscrit déjà la transcendance, comme relation avec un au-delà, dans l'immanence à soi de la conscience, en tant que son en deçà, sa condition. « Par suite, l'idée de l'infini est le mode d'être, l'infinition même de l'infini ». (...) Ici apparaît la divergence : le substantialisme cartésien ne permet pas d'affirmer avec Lévinas que : « Il n'y a pas d'idée de Dieu ou Dieu est sa propre idée ». E. Lévinas' philosophical attempt to make clear the intelligibility of transcendence leads him to Descartes' version of the concept of metaphysical exteriority, i.e. to his theme of the idea of the infinite. How far does this resemblance reach ? According to Lévinas, the responsibility — for — others already places transcendence, as a relation with a beyond, within the immanence in oneself which characterizes consciousness, as its condition. Consequently, « the idea of infinite is the mode, of existence, the infinition itself of the infinite ». Here, the difference points out : cartesian substantialism does not allow to assert, as Lévinas does, that « either there is no idea of God, or God is the idea of himself ». (shrink)
In this clear, accessible guide, Sean Hand sets Levinas's work in its intellectual and social contexts and examines: the influence of phenomenology and Judaism ...
