Emmanuel Levinas emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes--the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others--speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. However, his writings and thought are challenging and difficult. The Oxford Handbook of Levinas contains essays that aim to clarify and engage Levinas and (...) his writings in a number of ways. Some focus on central themes of his work, others on the ways in which he read and was influenced by figures from Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant to Blanchot, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. And there are essays on how his thinking has been appropriated in moral and political thought, psychology, film criticism, and more, and on the relation between his thinking and religious themes and traditions. Finally, several essays deal primarily with how readers have criticized him and found him wanting. The volume exposes and explores both the depth of Levinas's philosophical work and the range of applications to which it has been put, with special attention to clarifying why his interests in the human condition, the crisis of civilization, the centrality and character of ethics and morality, and the very meaning of human experience should be of interest to the widest range of readers. (shrink)

Throughout his life Kierkegaard was an engaged student of German philosophy. He was especially exercised by the German philosophy of his own day, which was dominated by the popularity of the Hegelian system and the critical discussions surrounding it. This chapter explores Kierkegaard's use of Hegel and of a number of lesser‐known Hegelians (Marheineke, Daub, Erdmann, Rosenkranz, Hotho, Werder, Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Strauss) and Hegel critics (Baader, I.H. Fichte, Schopenhauer, Trendelenburg, and Schelling). This study shows that Kierkegaard's interest in (...) the other figures traditionally associated with Hegelianism in fact goes far beyond this sole aspect of their thought. (shrink)

Robert Stern has argued that Levinas is a kind of command theorist and that, for this reason, Løgstrup can be understood to have provided an argument against Levinas. In this paper, I discuss Levinas’s use of the vocabulary of demand, order, and command in the light of Jewish philosophical accounts of such notions in the work of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emil Fackenheim. These accounts revise the traditional Jewish idea of command and I show that Levinas’s use of this (...) vocabulary is also revisionary. I show that in light of this tradition of discussion, Levinas’s use is not susceptible to the interpretation Stern proposes and thus that the Løgstrup-style argument cannot be used against Levinas. (shrink)

A major study of Kierkegaard and love exploring his description of love's treachery, difficulty, and hope.

Few philosophers have devoted more than passing attention to similarities between the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish Christian, and Emmanuel Levinas, a French Jew. Here, one of philosophy of religion's most distinctive voices offers a sustained comparison. Focusing on questions surrounding otherness, transcendence, postmodernity, and the nature of religious thought, Merold Westphal draws readers into a dialogue between the two thinkers. Westphal's masterful command of both philosophies shows that each can learn from the other. Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue (...) is an insightful and accessible contribution to philosophical considerations of ethics and religion. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION Ever since the beginning of the modern phenomenological movement disciplined attention has been paid to various patterns of human experience as ...

There is a growing recognition of Levinas's importance. It can in part be attributed to an increasing concern that twentieth-century continental philosophy seems to have no place for ethics. In making ethics fundamental to philosophy, rather than a problem to which we might one day return, Levinas transforms continental thought. The book brings together some of the most interesting and far-reaching responses to the work of Levinas, in three different areas: contemporary feminism, psychotherapy, and Levinas's relation to other philosophers. It (...) includes a newly translated paper by Levinas on suffering, and a specially commissioned interview. (shrink)

One opens this first volume of the Hong's long-awaited translation of Kierkegaard's Papirer with a sense of astonishment. For there on the first page in bold face type is the topic heading:, Abstraction. One reads further. Absurd; Action; The Ancients, The Classical; Anselm; Anthropology, Philosophy of Man-the topic headings unroll in alphabetical order. With a profound sense of the waste of it all, one gets the point: the Hongs have decided to present the Papirer in a topical not a chronological (...) ordering. Toward the end of their Preface the translators try to justify their topical presentation by noting: "Although the plan of the present English edition of selections primarily according to subject is in harmony with an emphasis by Kierkegaard, the Danish editors, and [Walter] Lowrie upon contiguity of content, the extent to which it exceeds what has been done in this direction is unabashedly in the interest of the reader." The appeal here to the authority of Kierkegaard himself and to his Danish editors is clearly misplaced. For Kierkegaard did not group his Papirer entries under topical headings—he wrote his thoughts down when they occurred to him, and collected them in notebooks in chronological order—and the Danish editors basically preserved this chronological ordering in their twenty volume edition. The chief benefit for a reader of the Danish edition is the possibility of following the evolution of Kierkegaard's thought and personality. What an irony that this new edition of the papers and journals of the arch "subjective thinker" actually makes it impossible to follow the subjective development of his thought!—J. T. (shrink)