ExcerptThe Omens In November 1961, the Einaudi publishing house published Renzo De Felice's Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo.1 The Wiener Library in London and both the Yad Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Memorial Authority in Jerusalem and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research of New York City had just published (respectively, at the beginning and the end of 1960) two bibliographies concerning the persecution of Jews in Europe, one authored by Ilse R. Wolff and the other by Philip Friedman (...) and Jacob Robinson.2 According to their works (in particular, according to the latter, more extensive one),…. (shrink)

Jacob Ross argues that the fission cases discussed in the personal identity literature cannot be accommodated without rejecting basic intuitions of everyday ethical thinking. He notes that many philosophers have responded to the challenge of fission ‘by rejecting the metaphysical assumptions on which it rests’. In particular, that many have denied that in fission one ceases to exist. He contends that these denials do not meet the challenge to commonsense ethical thinking. I reject these claims. One of the metaphysical (...) views he considers is the multiple occupancy view of Lewis and Robinson, according to which in fission there are all along two numerically distinct, initially collocated, persons. I claim that Ross has not shown that this view has counterintuitive ethical implications. (shrink)

Empirical research in bioethics has developed rapidly over the past decade, but has largely eschewed the use of technology-driven methodologies. We propose “design bioethics” as an area of conjoined theoretical and methodological innovation in the field, working across bioethics, health sciences and human-centred technological design. We demonstrate the potential of digital tools, particularly purpose-built digital games, to align with theoretical frameworks in bioethics for empirical research, integrating context, narrative and embodiment in moral decision-making. Purpose-built digital tools can engender situated engagement (...) with bioethical questions; can achieve such engagement at scale; and can access groups traditionally under-represented in bioethics research and theory. If developed and used with appropriate rigor, tools motivated by “design bioethics” could offer unique insights into new and familiar normative and empirical issues in the field. (shrink)

Totalism is the view that one distribution of well-being is better than another just in case the one contains a greater sum of well-being than the other. Many philosophers, following Parfit, reject totalism on the grounds that it entails the repugnant conclusion: that, for any number of excellent lives, there is some number of lives that are barely worth living whose existence would be better. This paper develops a theory of welfare aggregation—the lexical-threshold view—that allows totalism to avoid the repugnant (...) conclusion, as well as its analogues involving suffering populations and the lengths of individual lives. The theory is grounded in some independently plausible views about the structure of well-being, identifies a new source of incommensurability in population ethics, and avoids some of the implausibly extreme consequences of other lexical views, without violating the intuitive separability of lives. (shrink)

The idea of a role in nursing that includes expertise in ethics has been around for more than 30 years. Whether or not one subscribes to the idea that nursing ethics is separate and distinct from bioethics, nursing practice has much to contribute to the ethical practice of healthcare, and with the strong grounding in ethics and aspiration for social justice considerations in nursing, there is no wonder that the specific role of the nurse ethicist has emerged. Nurse ethicists, expert (...) in nursing practice and the application of ethical theories and concepts, are well positioned to guide nurses through complex ethical challenges. However, there is limited discussion within the field regarding the specific job responsibilities that the nurse ethicist ought to have. The recent appearance of job postings with the title “nurse ethicist” suggest that some healthcare institutions have identified the value of a nurse in the practice of ethics and are actively recruiting. Discomfort about the possibility of others defining the role of the nurse ethicist inspired this paper (and special issue). If the nurse ethicist is to be seen as an integral part of addressing ethical dilemmas and ethical conflicts that arise in healthcare, then nurse ethicists ought to be at the forefront of defining this role. In this paper, we draw upon our own experiences as nurse ethicists in large academic healthcare systems to describe the essential elements that ought to be addressed in a job description for a nurse ethicist practicing in a clinical setting linked to academic programs. Drawing upon our experience and the literature, we describe how we perceive the nurse ethicist adds value to healthcare organizations and teams of professional ethicists. (shrink)

The ‘expropriation of the expropriators’ is a delicious turn of phrase, one that Marx even compares to Hegel’s infamous ‘negation of the negation’. But what does it mean, and is it still relevant today? Before I analyse the content of Marx’s expression, I briefly consider contemporary legal understandings of expropriation, as well as some examples of it. In the remainder of the essay, I spell out different kinds of expropriation in Marx and focus on an ambiguity at the core of (...) the notion of ‘expropriating the expropriators’, namely, whether it describes an immanent and objective tendency within the development of the capitalist mode of production or else actively prescribes a form of revolutionary political praxis for the working class. My answer is that it does both, though not without tension. Finally, I develop some implications of these reflections by showing how the concept of expropriation can be put to use today, in struggles around housing, climate and work. (shrink)

Lara Buchak argues for a version of rank-weighted utilitarianism that assigns greater weight to the interests of the worse off. She argues that our distributive principles should be derived from the preferences of rational individuals behind a veil of ignorance, who ought to be risk averse. I argue that Buchak’s appeal to the veil of ignorance leads to a particular way of extending rank-weighted utilitarianism to the evaluation of uncertain prospects. This method recommends choices that violate the unanimous preferences of (...) rational individuals and choices that guarantee worse distributions. These results, I suggest, undermine Buchak’s argument for rank-weighted utilitarianism. (shrink)

According to asymmetric comparativism, it is worse for a person to exist with a miserable life than not to exist, but it is not better for a person to exist with a happy life than not to exist. My aim in this paper is to explain how asymmetric comparativism could possibly be true. My account of asymmetric comparativism begins with a different asymmetry, regarding the (dis)value of early death. I offer an account of this early death asymmetry, appealing to the (...) idea of conditional goods, and generalize it to explain how asymmetric comparativism could possibly be true. I also address the objection that asymmetric comparativism has unacceptably antinatalist implications. (shrink)

Aristotle is said to have held that any kind of actual infinity is impossible. I argue that he was a finitist (or "potentialist") about _magnitude_, but not about _plurality_. He did not deny that there are, or can be, infinitely many things in actuality. If this is right, then it has implications for Aristotle's views about the metaphysics of parts and points.

This book provides a detailed account of the role of property in German Idealism. It puts the concept of property in the center of the philosophical systems of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel and shows how property remains tied to their conceptions of freedom, right, and recognition. The book begins with a critical genealogy of the concept of property in modern legal philosophy, followed by a reconstruction of the theory of property in Kant's Doctrine of Right, Fichte's Foundations of Natural Right, (...) and Hegel's Jena Realphilosophie. By turning to the tradition of German Rechtsphilosophie, as opposed to the more standard libertarian and utilitarian frameworks of property, it explores the metaphysical, normative, political, and material questions that make property intelligible as a social relation. The book formulates a normative theory of property rooted in practical reason, mutual recognition, and social freedom. This relational theory of property, inspired by German Idealism, brings a fresh angle to contemporary property theory. Additionally, it provides crucial philosophical background to 19th century debates on private property, inequality, labor, socialism, capitalism, and the state. The Concept of Property in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in 19th Century German philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, political theory, and political economy. (shrink)

There is a common belief that genuine awareness and acceptance of the existence of anthropogenic climate change (as opposed to either ignorance or denial) automatically leads one to develop political and moral positions which advocate for collective human action toward minimizing suffering for all and adapting human societies toward a fossil-free future. This is a mistake. Against the idea that scientific awareness of the facts of climate change is enough to motivate a common ethical project of humanity toward a unifying (...) good, I argue that climate change awareness can just as well equally motivate heightened divisions of humanity into anti-egalitarian, xenophobic, class-differentiated zones of competitive survival. I call this climate barbarism, and seek to explain its conceptual grounds. (shrink)

In 1844, Johann Kaspar Schmidt, under the pen name “Max Stirner”, published a blistering critique of contemporary German philosophy, politics, and society called Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. Although Engels praised the book in private letters to Marx upon its arrival, a year and a half later he and Marx went to work demolishing every sentence in a 350-page unpublished manuscript called Saint Max, eventually edited and compiled a century later into the centerpiece of the German Ideology. Saint Max—perhaps the (...) most bombastic, literary, philosophical, polemical text that Marx ever wrote—is rarely read and almost never commented upon, a fact I hope to rectify here. In this paper, I will reconstruct a key debate between Marx and Stirner that occurred from 1843 to 1846 in four texts: Marx’s On the Jewish Question, Stirner’s The Unique and its Property, Marx’s Saint Max, and Stirner’s Stirner’s Critics. (shrink)

We simulate trial data to test speculative claims about research methods, such as the impact of publication bias.

This article diagnoses and critiques pervasive forms of teleological thought about basic structures of political organization in modern and contemporary political thought: arguments that the sovereign state, the nation-state, or some variant of a cosmopolis both represents the unfolding of history’s moral logic and offers us full moral personhood, agency, and maturity. Despite the received wisdom that modern political thought broke with teleology, I argue that early modern social contract theory was deeply teleological. The emergence of the normatively self-contained sovereign (...) state from the state of nature represented both decisive historical-moral progress from the medieval European non-state polities and the possibility of true moral personhood, thanks to the unity of will and judgment created by a unified authority structure. The article then argues that this overattachment to unity, both as an historical culmination and as a prerequisite to full personhood, was carried over into subsequent nationalist and cosmopolitan thought, where we see over-moralizations of historical processes, excessive claims for the teleological causal force of moral progress, and critiques of the immaturity of those persons who do not live in the recommended political form. The article closes with a sustained critique of both historical and individual-moral teleologies of these sorts. (shrink)

Max Stirner’s The Unique and Its Property (1844) is the first ruthless critique of modern society. In All Things are Nothing to Me, Jacob Blumenfeld reconstructs the unique philosophy of Max Stirner (1806–1856), a figure that strongly influenced—for better or worse—Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emma Goldman as well as numerous anarchists, feminists, surrealists, illegalists, existentialists, fascists, libertarians, dadaists, situationists, insurrectionists and nihilists of the last two centuries. -/- Misunderstood, dismissed, and defamed, Stirner’s work is considered by some to be (...) the worst book ever written. It combines the worst elements of philosophy, politics, history, psychology, and morality, and ties it all together with simple tautologies, fancy rhetoric, and militant declarations. That is the glory of Max Stirner’s unique footprint in the history of philosophy. -/- Jacob Blumenfeld wanted to exhume this dead tome along with its dead philosopher, but discovered instead that, rather than deceased, their spirits are alive and quite well, floating in our presence. All Things are Nothing to Me is a forensic investigation into how Stirner has stayed alive throughout time. (shrink)

Non-cognitive gadgets are fancy tools shaped to meet specific, local needs. Cecilia Heyes defines cognitive gadgets as dedicated psychological mechanisms created through social interactions and culturally, not genetically, inherited by humans. She has boldly proposed that many human cognitive mechanisms are gadgets. If true, these claims would have far-reaching implications for our scientific understanding of human social cognition. Here we assess Heyes’s cognitive gadget approach as it applies to mindreading. We do not think that the evidence supports Heyes’s thought-provoking thesis (...) that human children are taught to read minds the way they are taught to read words. We highlight a potential circularity lurking behind this analogy, and we explain why we are unpersuaded by Heyes’s anti-mentalistic proposal for handling data inconsistent with the gadget view, which others take to be evidence for mindreading in human infancy. We conclude that while human minds may well be filled with gadgets, mindreading is unlikely to be one of them. (shrink)

Many just war theorists (call them traditionalists) claim that just as people have a right to personal self-defense, so nations have a right to national-defense against an aggressive military invasion. David Rodin claims that the traditionalist is unable to justify most defensive wars against aggression. For most aggressive states only commit conditional aggression in that they threaten to kill or maim the citizens of the nation they are invading only if those citizens resist the occupation. Most wars, then, claimed to (...) be justified by the traditionalist fail to meet the proportionality criterion. Thus, a just war, for Rodin, is best conceived of as a punitive war of law enforcement, not as a war of national-defense. I argue that Rodin does not have a case against the traditionalist. If national-defense is a disproportionate response to conditional aggression, then punitive war is a disproportionate response as well. Furthermore, the belief that punitive war is a proportionate response to conditional aggression underscores the traditionalist’s view that self-determination, cultural identity and the like are of sufficient value to defend by means of lethal force. I end the paper by very briefly sketching an account, different from that of Rodin’s, of how individual nations can be justified in waging wars of law enforcement. (shrink)

This paper reports laboratory data for games that are played only once. These games span the standard categories: static and dynamic games with complete and incomplete information. For each game, the treasure is a treatment in which behavior conforms nicely to predictions of the Nash equilibrium or relevant refinement. In each case, however, a change in the payoff structure produces a large inconsistency between theoretical predictions and observed behavior. These contradictions are generally consistent with simple intuition based on the interaction (...) of payoff asymmetries and noisy introspection about others’ decisions. (shrink)

Theories on empathy have argued that feeling empathy for others is related to accurate recognition of their emotions. Previous research that tested this assumption, however, has reported inconsiste...

On Zeno Beach there are infinitely many grains of sand, each half the size of the last. Supposing Aristotle denied the possibility of Zeno Beach, did he have a good argument for the denial? Three arguments, each of ancient origin, are examined: the beach would be infinitely large; the beach would be impossible to walk across; the beach would contain a part equal to the whole, whereas parts must be lesser. It is attempted to show that none of these arguments (...) was Aristotle’s. Indeed, perhaps Aristotle’s finitism applied to magnitude only, not plurality. (shrink)

Helen Frowe has recently objected to Michael Tooley’s famous Moral Symmetry Principle, which is meant to show that in themselves killing and letting die are morally equivalent. I argue that her objection is not compelling but a more compelling objection is available. Specifically, Tooley’s rebuttal of a proposed counter-example to his Moral Symmetry Principle has two problematic implications. First, it undercuts the very principle itself. If we reject the proposed counter-example, then any instance of the Moral Symmetry Principle will actually (...) demonstrate the moral in-equivalence of killing and letting die. Second, it commits us to the view, which Tooley wishes to avoid, that we are just as obligated to refrain from doing wrong as we are to prevent others from doing the same. I conclude with a brief discussion of a more general concern regarding Tooley’s basic strategy. My focus here is quite narrow. My claims, if plausible, only show that the Moral Symmetry Principle is unsound and thus cannot serve as a basis for the view that killing and letting die are morally equivalent. (shrink)

Aristotle offers several arguments in Physics viii.8 for his thesis that, when something moves back and forth, it does not undergo a single motion. These arguments occur against the background of a sophisticated theory, expounded in Physics v—vi, of the basic structure of motions and of other continuous entities such as times and magnitudes. The arguments in Physics viii.8 stand in a complex relation to that theory. On the one hand, Aristotle evidently relies on the theory in a number of (...) crucial steps. Yet in other steps he seems to contradict or misapply the theory. This situation offers the occasion to examine Aristotle’s views about some fundamentals in the metaphysics of motion, while also raising questions about the unity of the text which has come down to us as the Physics. (shrink)

Volume 31, Issue 1, January 2023, Page 103-126.

This study reports the results of a survey of 405 high school students in a school district in the western United States. The data were used to determine why so many students take only the minimal science required for graduation. Key areas addressed included how science is taught; science literacy; science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM); science, technology, and society (STS); and who influences students to take science. Results were directed at how to motivate more students to continue science study (...) beyond the required courses and how to improve the prospect of more students choosing STEM majors in higher education. Key conclusions included that no new science courses are needed to increase enrollments, but existing courses need to be taught differently, specifically with more labs and activities that create more interest and relevance for students. Furthermore, students need more awareness of good reasons for taking science. Last, science instruction must improve. (shrink)

What I will argue here is that the ethical potentiality of the human being that Aristotle cites in the Nicomachean Ethics refers to the general, rational capacity for someone to appropriate and develop their own specific, natural capacities which make them human; the name of this ability is called virtue, which, when expressed in actions, we call good. To separate out the concepts at work here demands an exegesis of the two kinds of dunamis in Metaphysics Theta, that is, dunamis (...) as causal power of change and dunamis as a potential way of being for an existent capacity. Once we grasp this, we can clarify the nature of virtue as the active, complete state of a capacity in human being which defines their function even though it must be acquired, and it need not ever be actualized. The concepts of habit (ethos) and practical judgment (phronesis) give Aristotle the means to solve the problem of how such a potentiality is acquired and how it is actualized, and hence we will end with a discussion of them. -/- . (shrink)

Agamben’s notion of the ‘paradigm’ has far-reaching implications for educational thinking, curriculum design and pedagogical conduct. In his approach, examples—or paradigms—deeply engage our powers of analogy, enabling us to discern previously unseen affinities among singular objects by stepping outside established systems of classification. In this way we come to envision novel groupings, new patterns of connection—that nonetheless do not simply reassemble those singular objects into yet another rigidly fixed set or class. Agamben sees this sort of ‘paradigmatic understanding’ as our (...) richest source of intelligibility. For Agamben the paradigm is ultimately about learning to see again, starting not with already perfectly known and categorized objects (or ideas), but rather with a fresh experience of one individual object and the analogical relations it may have to others, and to novel groupings that may arise. The paradigm is a method, a way in which educators might respond to a wide range of educational challenges. For a paradigmatic relation suspends while exposing, deactivates while revealing, complicates while clarifying. But articulating the enigmatic paradigmatic relation between example and class is far more than a method. It is epistemological (a way of knowing and conception of knowledge), ethical (a fostering of freedom from presupposed categories and reified principles) and ontological (a type of being that exposes the potential of knowing and communicating—their intelligibility and communicability). In these qualities, paradigms exhibit to educators a free, a new use of singularities. (shrink)

I draw a phenomenological approach to religious violence by using as an example the terror apparatus called Daesh. After a brief reminder of my method, I analyze the schemas that underlie this apparatus, especially the schemas of the messiah and the Apocalypse, and the affects that the apparatus manages to capture. I show that messianic hope can be associated with hate through the figure of the anti-messiah—Christian Antichrist, the Dajjal of Muslims—which allows messianism to be tied to the schema of (...) the “evil conspiracy.” I finally suggest that it is possible to understand messianism differently by dissociating it from these other schemas. (shrink)

A nation commits mitigated aggression by threatening to kill the citizens of a victim nation if and only if they do not submit to being ruled in a non-egregiously oppressive way. Such aggression primarily threatens a nation’s common way of life . According to David Rodin, a war against mitigated aggression is automatically disproportionate, as the right of lethal self-defense only extends to protecting against being killed or enslaved. Two strategies have been adopted in response to Rodin. The first strategy (...) grants that CWL is insufficiently valuable to lethally defend, however, other considerations can satisfy the proportionality requirement. I argue that this strategy is not persuasive. The second strategy argues for the sufficient value of CWL. This, however, fails to answer the forceful ‘benign dictator’ objection. I respond to this objection by grounding the proportionality of a defensive war in the value of what Phillip Pettit calls ‘anti-power’. (shrink)

In the history of interpretations of Hegel, how one reads the chapter on “Absolute Knowing” in the Phenomenology of Spirit determines one’s whole perspective. In fact, Marx’s only comments on the Phenomenology concern this final chapter, taking it as the very “secret” of Hegel’s philosophy. But what is the secret hidden within the thicket of this impenetrable prose? My suggestion is that it turns on a very specific meaning of the “abolition of time” that Hegel describes in the very last (...) paragraphs. But the meaning of this idea is not what Marx criticized in his last Manuscript of 1844, that is, it is not simply a form of idealism which abolishes the finitude of man. Rather this relationship to time accepts such finitude, making it the central axis upon which the possibility of freedom turns. In this paper, I will present a reading of “Absolute Knowing” that focuses on the meaning of overcoming time, and connect it to some thoughts on “disposable time” that Marx discusses in the Grundrisse. (shrink)

In a recent article, Xiaofei Liu seeks to defend, from the standpoint of consequentialism, the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing: DDA. While there are various conceptions of DDA, Liu understands it as the view that it is more difficult to justify doing harm than allowing harm. Liu argues that a typical harm doing involves the production of one more evil and one less good than a typical harm allowing. Thus, prima facie, it takes a greater amount of good to justify (...) doing a certain harm than it does to justify allowing that same harm. In this reply, I argue that Liu fails to show, from within a consequentialist framework, that there is an asymmetry between the evils produced by doing and allowing harm. I conclude with some brief remarks on what may establish such an asymmetry. (shrink)

Traditional just war theory maintains that the two types of rules that govern justice in times of war, jus ad bellum (justice of war) and jus in bello (justice in war), are logically independent of one another. Call this the independence thesis. According to this thesis, a war that satisfies the ad bellum rules does not guarantee that the in bello rules will be satisfied; and a war that violates the ad bellum rules does not guarantee that the in bello (...) rules will be violated. A controversial implication of this is that it’s possible for soldiers to undergo acts that are instrumental in bringing about victory in an unjust war and yet do nothing morally wrong. Some authors – call them purists – claim that this cannot be correct. Participating in an unjust war is by itself morally wrong. Yitzhak Benbaji has given what is to my mind the strongest defense of the independence thesis. In this paper I critically examine Benbaji’s argument and conclude that it is not persuasive. My argument against Benbaji incorporates the concept of honor in the military. I seek to show, in part, that if the recent literature is correct concerning both the nature of honor and the importance of instilling it in soldiers, then Benbaji hasn’t given the purist a compelling reason to give up her view. (shrink)

Panexperientialists hold that experience is a fundamental feature of our universe, and that their view avoids radical emergence by providing an intelligible ground for our human experiences. This paper argues that they face a radical emergence problem of their own, and that they can avoid radical emergence only by adopting a strategy that can also be used by dualists (whose view they reject). It also argues that panexperientialists must either hold that all experiential properties they regard as simple must have (...) been actually instantiated since the earliest days of our universe, or accept radical emergence, or avoid radical emergence by a strategy that can also be adopted by dualists. (shrink)

There’s a widespread intuition that if the only way an innocent person can stop her villainous attacker from killing her is to kill him instead, then she is morally permitted to do so. But why is it that she is permitted to employ lethal force on an aggressor if that is what is required to save her life? My primary goal in this paper is to defend David Rodin's fairly recent and under-recognized account of self-defense that answers this question. There (...) are roughly two kinds of non-consequentialist accounts of self-defense:'forced-choice' accounts and 'rights-based' accounts. I first examine what I take to be the most plausible 'forced-choice' account of self-defense and I argue that it is unable to withstand two recent criticisms. I then proceed to adjudicate between two prominent 'rights-based' accounts of self-defense: call them the Thomson/Uniacke account and the Rodinian account. Any rights-based account of self-defense must explain how it is that X, who villainously tries to kill Y, forfeits his right to life. I argue both that Thomson/Uniacke's explanation cannot account for the clear permissibility of killing a certain kind of aggressor in self-defense, and that the attempts that could be made to account for this permissibility are either ad-hoc or permit the killing of persons that are morally on par with innocent bystanders. I point out how Thomson/Uniacke can evade the seeming difficulties that I raise by only permitting lethal defensive force against culpable aggressors. But allowing defensive force to be employed only on the culpable goes against one of their central tenets. I then discuss the Rodinian account, how it evades the criticisms I raise, as well as its other virtues. I conclude that while it has difficulties of its own, it is the more plausible one to adopt. (shrink)

Lévinas is the philosopher of the absolutely Other, the thinker of the primacy of the ethical relation, the poet of the face. Against the formalism of Kantian subjectivity, the totality of the Hegelian system, the monism of Husserlian phenomenology and the instrumentalism of Heideggerian ontology, Lévinas develops a phenomenological account of the ethical relation grounded in the idea of infinity, an idea which is concretely produced in the experience with the absolutely other, particularly, in their face. The face of the (...) other, irreducible to any ontological structure of being or any epistemological intentionality of representation, reaches out from on high across the abyss of the isolated ego, commanding respect all the while granting the possibility of murder. This experience overflows the subjective capacity of the separated ego, forcing it “beyond being.” This anarchic relation with the Other is the groundless condition of possibility for ethical life, that is, truly human life. The structure of the ethical relation can then be determined in hindsight as the ground of meaning for what it is to be an I at all. -/- This is a pretty uncontroversial reading of Lévinas' work, especially Totality and Infinity. And yet, there is one small problem. If this is what Lévinas is doing, then why does the largest section of Totality and Infinity – section II, “Interiority and Economy” – have nothing to do with ethics, the other, or the face at all? Why is it devoted to an arduous analysis of what he calls separation, egoism, economy, enjoyment, labour, and possession? In other words, why does Lévinas spend so much energy on writing about the egoist at the heart of his magnum opus, which is supposedly a text devoted to the Other? And furthermore, why is this section one of the least discussed in the secondary literature on Lévinas? -/- These questions motivate the present inquiry, which modestly seeks to understand what Lévinas is up to in this section. Once laying out the basic story, I will focus on the concepts of labour and possession, for I think these are the unrecognized pivots upon which the transition from ego to Other turns. I will also make some slight attempts to interpret Lévinas' direct or indirect comments on Plato, Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. For although he distances himself from these giants, he stands on their shoulders as well. (shrink)