A generation of students at the Faculty of Theology of the K.U.Leuven have been introduced by Roger Burggraeve to the thoughts of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas has been for him a true "master in thinking". For Levinas responsibility is heteronymous because it does not start from the "I" but from the epiphany of the other as the face, appealing to me not "to kill" but to promote him/her. In and through the appeal of the face, the difference between the (...) other and me - expressed in the irreducible alterity of the other - is, ethically speaking, the appeal to the highest "non-indifference": proximity without absorption. As Levinas' thinking carries on obvious Jewish-Talmudic imprint, Burggraeve was interested as to how the concept of responsibility can be connected to a biblically inspired ethic. In which way can the Levinasian view on responsibility enhance a Christian anthropology, and in particular that one articulated by Louvain personalism, and in its turn inspired by a Christian anthropology, so that it benefits from uniquely Christian accents? In this Festschrift for Roger Burggraeve, authors explore the theme of "Responsibility, God and Society" in order to answer two questions. What does Levinas' ethic of responsibility have to offer Christian theology? And vice-versa, what can Christian theology offer to contemporary ethical thought on personal, relational and societal responsibility. (shrink)

Levinas is a thinker for the future, concerned with the future. He inverts the priority of the declaration of the French Revolution "Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood", by designating "brotherhood" first among modern European society's most cherished values. Levinas sees brotherhood as the fundamental condition of our shared humanity and as the foundation of freedom and equality. Thus, he presents himself as a Western thinker who sets modern thought on its head and at the same time enriches it. His radical view of (...) the other, responsibility, subjectivity and the Infinite remains a challenge, today more than ever. Calling out to both religious and secular seekers alike, Levinas asks for an alert and critical dialogue of the ethical and metaphysical meaning of our inter-human and social relationships. In this work, a new generation of philosophers, ethicists and theologians embark on a conversation with Levians, with due appreciation for his genius and uninhibitedness in their questioning. The intermediaries in this provocative dialogue are: Hannah Arendt, Henri Bergson, Anders Nygren, Paul Ricoeur and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The following themes are thus treated: - ethics as liberation and redemption beyond the self - time, duration and alterity - freedom, society and politics - desire between eros and agape - 'good enough' parenting and family ethics - conversational processes and pastoral counselling - asymmetry and reciprocity between the self and the other - modern humanism vs. post-modern anti-humanism as an inspiration for a renewed secular humanism - suffering, death and euthanasia - perspectives and boundaries of interreligious dialogue - the (im)possibility of a Christian interpretation of Levinas' Jewish-inspired thought - a new Christian theology of Trinitarian praxis. This volume likewise includes contributions by: Roger Burggraeve, W. Wolf Diedrich, Annemie Dillen, Thomas Folens, Glen Morrison, Marianne Moyaert, Marina Riemslagh, Anya Topolski, Emilie Van Daele, Jean Vanheessen, Sophie Veulemans and Torben Wolfs. In this book Levinas is presented as an 'extra-ordinary' other who awakes into vigilance the conscience of not only the contributors, but the readers as well: one speaks and the other responds differently. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas died a few days before he would have been ninety years old, on December 25, 1995, very early on a Monday morning, in the Paris clinic of Beaujon, where he had been admitted the previous day with serious heart complications.

In the view of the Franco-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas money has a multitude of anthropological and ethical meanings, not excluding contradictions. For money functions on different levels, namely on that of the I and the effort of its being, that of the relation with the other and that of the ‘third’, that is to say on the socio-economical and judicial level.It will have become clear that Levinas’ philosophical approach to money not only offers a phenomenological description, but also expressly formulates (...) an ethical and thus normative dimension. It not only tries to understand what ‘is’ , but also opens up perspectives on what ‘should be’ . It is thus not a neutral, disengaged analysis, but literally a ‘pro vocative’ or ‘calling-forth’ approach that thereby calls the factual praxis of money critically into question regarding its ethical quality, or its humanity.This ethical approach lays bare not only the different sense but also the ambivalences and contradictions of money. In this respect, money is never a self-evident ‘good’ about which a naive sort of metaphysics or entrenched ‘doctrine of being’ could be developed, but a literally ‘ambivalent’ middle term that not only can enter the service of evil but, precisely through its so-called neutral objectivity, can bring to this same evil the seductive and misleading charm of the good. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas died a few days before he would have been ninety years old, on December 25, 1995, very early on a Monday morning, in the Paris clinic of Beaujon, where he had been admitted the previous day with serious heart complications.

John-Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor examines the commandments, in particular the Decalogue. In so far as it is the expression of ‘natural law’ applicable and reflexively accessible to all, it is a permanent charter not only of Christian inspired ethics but of every human ethic . Using the story of the rich young man, cited in the encyclical’s first chapter, we would like to elucidate in the first part, and in our own way, how prohibitions open the way for freedom (...) and the richness of human creativity.This will show that Christian ethics, for which the Decalogue is of essential importance, cannot limit itself to drawing borders. Prohibitions are only a necessary condition and not a sufficient ground for a Christian ethic inspired by the gospel whose heart is the living person of Jesus the Christ. A Christian ethic does not end with delimiting borders that make possible and protect certain fundamental values; it also opens its own perspectives for a tasteful shaping of a qualified freedom that is ‘won’ thanks to keeping the commandments. This in turn leads to the point of the second part: a look at ‘taste’ and aesthetics in ethics. This will show how a balanced Christian ethic will necessarily be marked by a bipolarity of prohibition and taste.[...]CONCLUSIONEthics is not a simple matter; it is a complex field wherein orientations, commandments and prohibitions, suggestions, examples and experiences all play a role. We hope that it is now evident that ethics, on the existential level of experience, can only function properly when there is a tension between prohibition and taste. A one-sided emphasis or absolutizing of one of the two leads to the self-destruction of ethics. Reducing ethics to obeying commandments and prohibitions leads to a rejection of ethics, while a narcissistic absolutizing of taste leads to a destruction of ethics in as far as it results in the aestheticism of pure taste and in arbitrariness. Only an ethic that remains normatively modest by focusing its attention on the essential delimiting rules that protect basic values opens perspectives towards a creative meaningful life as a ‘lively adventure’. (shrink)

Drawing on Victor Frankl’s observations, this comment illustrates how human beings are prior to any initiative that is pre-directed towards meaning. In pointing to this human condition, it introduces a subtle distinction between striving for happiness and a will for meaning, yet it is in the trans-ethical meaningful acts that a relation can be found with the witnessing as referred to by Note and Van Daele.

Sexual experimentation, living together, raising children outside of marriage, remarriage after divorce, and same-sex relationships...These behaviours have become common in the wider society as well as among Christians and Catholic Christians. Not only do they think and act differently than the official Church teaching, but they do so convinced that they are acting rightly. This challenges ethics to respond by what can be called an 'ethics of mercy', by meeting people where they are and helping them to grow towards the (...) fullness of life and love. Such a pastoral and educational ethics of growth should dare to stand within the tension between what is desirable and what is attainable, without surrendering the 'pro-vocative' idea of conjugal covenant as the basis for the family. Mercy is needed not only after ethics but in ethics. In harmony with Pope Francis's plea for a 'gospel of mercy', this book seeks a middle way between merciless rigourism and relativising subjectivism. It proposes an ethics of redemption that accompanies people on their way to meaningful living and loving, grounded in a spirituality that springs from the salvation offered in Jesus. (shrink)

A l'occasion de son 25eme anniversaire, le Groupement Belge des Banques d'Epargne a publie un ouvrage de base sur les aspects historiques, juridiques et economiques du monde des banques d'epargne belges. Emmanuel Levinas etait prie d'ecrire une introduction philosophique sur l'argent et l'epargne. Il a accepte volontiers, toutefois en soulignant des le debut et a plusieurs reprises qu'il y avait reflechi trop peu et qu'il eprouvait des difficultes en employant les notions valeur de l'argent/valeur de l'epargne. Il en a resulte (...) que cette etude, ne pouvant pas etre achevee a temps, ne faisait finalement pas partie de l'ouvrage de base. C'est l'entretien preparatoire, dirige par monsieur M. Lambrechts et dont il a envoye a l'avance a E. Levinas une preparation basee sur des textes d'E. Levinas, d'Aristote, de P. Veyne et de P. Claudel, qui est reproduit ici. Lors de la celebration solennelle au Palais des Congres a Bruxelles le 11 decembre 1986, c'est Emmanuel Levinas lui-meme qui a prononce le discours academique. Le texte de ce discours, qui n'a jamais ete publie jusqu'a aujourd'hui, est egalement reproduit dans cette publication. C'est d'ailleurs ce texte que Levinas a retravaille au debut de 1987 et qui est devenu sa contribution definitive sous le titre Socialite et argent. (shrink)

Inleiding tot het denken van de Frans-joodse wijsgeer (1905- ).

La diffusion d'une pensée s'accompagne souvent de son édulcoration. Les "grandes idées" identifiées sont rabâchées, ressassées, réduites, donnant lieu à des associations aussi rapides que funestes, telle celle qui fait d'Emmanuel Levinas "le philosophe de l'autre". La réflexion bouleversante du philosophe qui fit de l'éthique la philosophie première menaçait ainsi de tourner au prêchi-prêcha quasi-johannique. L'année du centenaire, 2006, sollicitant les chercheurs d'horizons multiples, a permis de faire résonner nombre d'aspects encore méconnus de l'œuvre lévinassienne, nourrie de quatre cultures, - (...) la juive, la russe, l'allemande et la française -, mais aussi des divers apprentissages existentiels et scientifiques du philosophe. L'histoire, la sienne propre, celle de son peuple, les rencontres d'affinités ou de devoir, se reflètent dans des livres entiers ou des passages de son œuvre, stimulant ses lecteurs, venus de la littérature, de la philosophie, et des sciences de l'homme, d'Europe occidentale et orientale, d'outre Atlantique. (shrink)

Studie over het denken van de Frans-Joodse filosoof (geb. 1905).

Le receuil 'Recherches levinassiennes' présente le dialogue attentif de 29 auteurs, surtout des philosophes mais aussi des théologiens, avec la pensée de Levinas, permettant à cette pensée de révéler des aspects jusque-là inconnus.

The parable “Before the Law” is a pivotal text in the work of Franz Kafka. It tells of a man who looks for the law as the quintessence of his life. But his quest for meaning comes to a crisis because of a fundamental deception. Instead of interpreting the law as a personal mystery, he somehow objectifies it. His abstract view on life begets the obstacle-character that embodies all those who could bar him from finding the law. In this narrative, (...) the failure of finding the law results in a murder in which human life is reduced to bestial death. In this sense, Kafka’s narrative is a tale of anti-creation. In a close reading we analyze the text with attention for the ternary structure, i.e. the intertwined complex of the I-Thou relation and the I-It relation. The literary text is interpreted for its philosophical relevance. Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas but also Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida have an important role in this way of reading. (shrink)

In this paper, we suggest the likely effects of the application of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy to the care ethic, particularly as it is represented by the author Joan Tronto, one of the most cogent exponents of care ethics.Thus, we ask: does Levinas’s philosophy have enough in common with the care ethic to be able to overlap it and fruitfully address shared issues of pressing importance? And, is Levinas’s philosophy different enough to challenge the care ethic and help it grow in (...) the ways that it must to become a more philosophically recognized and viable perspective? Our answer is affirmative in both regards.This paper does not intend to criticize the philosophy of Levinas on the basis of care ethics but instead lends the care ethic a perspective with the philosophical legitimacy that it has been hitherto lacking.In terms of alterations to the care ethics, we believe first and foremost that, from a Levinasian point of departure, it would be necessary for the care ethic to adopt a greater awareness of asymmetry in the ethical relation, as well as become more future-oriented towards the consequences of the individual agent’s actions. (shrink)

Bijdragen over de visie van de Frans-joodse filosoof (1906-1995) op het kwaad.

Since 2008, in Flanders, we organize immersion sessions in a simulated context with the aim of stimulating student nurses and health professionals to learn virtuous caring. In this contribution, we first outline the purpose of this experiential learning: the cultivation of moral character. We come to the core of what we mean by moral character for care. We refer to Joan Tronto and Stan van Hooft to claim that caring is central to all aspects of nursing practice and is the (...) basis of its moral quality. We also stipulate that caring involves the integration of action with emotions, motivations, and knowledge. Second, we briefly explain how the immersion sessions in the care ethics lab take place and, in particular, reflect on what it yields in terms of experiences for the participants who take on the role of simulant patients in this experiential learning process. We focus on the significant role contrast experiences play in these experiences. Especially the negative contrast experiences do not wear off easily; care professionals remember even long after the immersion session and continue to carry them with them as a “corporeal built-in alarm.” Third, we discuss the role of contrast experiences in cultivating moral character for care. In particular, we explore the role of the body in the kind of knowing it cultivates and, by extension, its role in cultivating virtuous caring. By referring to specific philosophical ideas of Gabriël Marcel, Hans Jonas and Emmanuel Levinas, we try to understand how contrast experiences bring about an integration of virtuous action into knowledge, motivation, and emotion. We conclude that we need more space for contrast experiences in cultivating moral character. More attention should be paid to the role of the body in this learning process. (shrink)

This final comment provides, a theoretical framework on how to conceive the self as presented in the key-note paper ‘Meaningfulness, volunteering and being moved. The event of witnessing’. This is deemed requisite to achieve a full understanding of how depth in meaningfulness comes about.

Winner of the Wolf Prize for his contribution to our understanding of the universe, Penrose takes on the question of whether artificial intelligence will ever ...

the symmetry of our evidential situation. If our confidence is best modeled by a standard probability function this means that we are to distribute our subjective probability or credence sharply and evenly over possibilities among which our evidence does not discriminate. Once thought to be the central principle of probabilistic reasoning by great..

A rational person doesn’t believe just anything. There are limits on what it is rational to believe. How wide are these limits? That’s the main question that interests me here. But a secondary question immediately arises: What factors impose these limits? A first stab is to say that one’s evidence determines what it is epistemically permissible for one to believe. Many will claim that there are further, non-evidentiary factors relevant to the epistemic rationality of belief. I will be ignoring the (...) details of alternative answers in order to focus on the question of what kind of rational constraints one’s evidence puts on belief. Our main question concerns how far epistemic permission and obligation can come apart.1 Suppose I am epistemically permitted to believe P, i.e., it would not be irrational for me to believe it. Am I thereby obliged to believe P, or are other options rationally available to me?2 Might I be equally rational in remaining agnostic about P, or even believing not-P? Or could even a slightly stronger or weaker degree of confidence be just as reasonable? (shrink)

I believe that Tom is the proud father of a baby boy. Why do I think his child is a boy? A natural answer might be that I remember that his name is ‘Owen’ which is usually a boy’s name. Here I’ve given information that might be part of a causal explanation of my believing that Tom’s baby is a boy. I do have such a memory and it is largely what sustains my conviction. But I haven’t given you just (...) any causally relevant information, I’ve given my grounds for my belief. I’ve given reasons that might justify me in supposing that Tom’s baby is a boy. Less naturally, the question might be taken as a request for a broader causal explanation of my holding this belief. Appropriate answers might cite all manner of facts concerning the evolution of the human race, why I chose to pursue philosophy and hence came to know Tom, the mechanisms of email transmission, the firing of various neurons, the circumstances of concept formation as a result of which I’m able to grasp the thought that Tom’s baby is a boy, and so on. It is an interesting question what distinguishes the narrower set of answers that I first suggested. I won’t pursue that here. I assume you have a good enough sense of the distinction I’m drawing. We might call the narrower set of answers justifying reasons, the kind of reasons I might cite in justifying my belief. Answers of the first sort are clearly relevant to epistemological evaluation. In assessing whether you know p or are rational in believing it to the degree you do, I will naturally want to consider what reasons you have for your belief. In deliberating myself about whether to believe p, in seeking an answer to the question of whether p, I will naturally consider what reasons or grounds I have to suppose that p. But what I want to focus on here is how explanations of the broader sort bear on such questions as whether to believe p. From a third-person perspective we can ask, ‘In assessing the epistemic status of S’s belief that p, what is the relevance of causal information that lies outside of the realm of justifying reasons?’ From the first-person standpoint we can ask ‘In seeking to answer whether p, how should such causal information affect my deliberations?’ At first it might seem that such broader causal information could have little relevance if any. Like any belief my belief that p can be traced back to innumerable causes from far and wide.. (shrink)

ports the thesis that there exist very many universes. The view has found favor with a number of philosophers such as Derek Parfit ~1998!, J. J. C. Smart ~1989! and Peter van Inwagen ~1993!.1 My purpose is to argue that this is a mistake. First let me set out the issue in more detail.

Perspectives on Quine, now available in paperback, is a collection of twenty-one new essays dealing with the thought of America's most distinguished living philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine. After the editors' brief introduction to Quine's thought, the volume opens with an important new essay by Quine entitled Three Indeterminacies. The essays that follow, written by leading philosophers, are rich with insights into a wide variety of Quine's concerns ranging from logic and set theory to natural language, truth, evidence, natural kinds, (...) naturalized epistemology, and much more. Each essay concludes with a summary and response from Quine himself. (shrink)

This paper is a plea for hedonism to be taken more seriously. It begins by charting hedonism's decline, and suggests that this is a result of two major objections: the claim that hedonism is the ‘philosophy of swine’, reducing all value to a single common denominator, and Nozick's ‘experience machine’ objection. There follows some elucidation of the nature of hedonism, and of enjoyment in particular. Two types of theory of enjoyment are outlined–internalism, according to which enjoyment has some special ‘feeling (...) tone’, and externalism, according to which enjoyment is any kind of experience to which we take some special attitude, such as that of desire. Internalism–the traditional view–is defended against current externalist orthodoxy. The paper ends with responses to the philosophy of swine and the experience machine objections. (shrink)

It is notoriously difficult to spell out the norms of inductive reasoning in a neat set of rules. I explore the idea that explanatory considerations are the key to sorting out the good inductive inferences from the bad. After defending the crucial explanatory virtue of stability, I apply this approach to a range of inductive inferences, puzzles, and principles such as the Raven and Grue problems, and the significance of varied data and random sampling.

critical analyses of the arguments and attitudes favoring the various popular datings of the inception of a human being's life.