Book Description
This work offers a new interpretation of what Levinas means when he says that we are infinitely responsible to the other person.
Author : Diane Perpich
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 17,97 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0804759421
This work offers a new interpretation of what Levinas means when he says that we are infinitely responsible to the other person.
Author : Sean Hand
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 39,84 MB
Release : 2014-04-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1317832485
Emmanuel Levinas is one of the key philosophers in the post-Heideggerian field and an increasingly central presence in contemporary debates about identity and responsibility. His work spans and encapsulates the major philosophical and ethical concerns of the twentieth century, combining the insights of a basic phenomenological training with the demands of a Jewish culture and its basis in the endless exegesis of Talmudic reading. His concerns and subjects are wide: they include the Other, the body, infinity, women, Jewish-Christian relations, Zionism and the impulses and limits of philosophical language itself. This collection explicates Levinas's major contribution to these debates, namely the idea of the primacy of ethics over ontology or epistemology. It investigates how, in the wake of a post-structuralist orthodoxy, scholars and practitioners in such fields as literary theory, cultural studies, feminism and psychoanalysis are turning to Levinas's work to articulate a rediscovered concern with the ethical dimension of their discipline. Stressing the largely assumed but unexplored Jewish dimension of Levinas's work, this book is an important contribution to the field of Jewish studies and philosophy.
Author : Simon Critchley
Publisher :
Page : 169 pages
File Size : 47,2 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0198738765
Levinas's idea of ethics as a relation of responsibility to the other person has become a highly influential and recognizable position across a wide range of academic and non-academic fields. Simon Critchley's aim in this book is to provide a less familiar, more troubling, and (hopefully) truer account of Levinas's work. A new dramatic method for reading Levinas is proposed, where the fundamental problem of his work is seen as the attempt to escape from the tragedy of Heidegger's philosophy and the way in which that philosophy shaped political events in the last century. Extensive and careful attention is paid to Levinas' fascinating but often overlooked work from the 1930s, where the proximity to Heidegger becomes clearer. Levinas's problem is very simple: how to escape from the tragic fatality of being as described by Heidegger. Levinas's later work is a series of attempts to answer that problem through claims about ethical selfhood and a series of phenomenological experiences, especially erotic relations and the relation to the child. These claims are analyzed in the book through close textual readings. Critchley reveals the problem with Levinas's answer to his own philosophical question and suggests a number of criticisms, particular concerning the question of gender. In the final, speculative part of the book, another answer to Levinas's problem is explored through a reading of the Song of Songs and the lens of mystical love.
Author : E. Wyschogrod
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 40,73 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9401020442
Emmanuel Levinas recounts the main events of his life in a brief essay, "Signature," appended to a collection of essays on social, political and religious themes entitled Dillicile Uberti. He was born in I905 in Lithu ania and in I9I7, while living in the Ukraine, experienced the collapse of the old regime in Russia. In I923 he came to the University of Strasbourg where Charles Blondel, Halbwachs, Pradines, Carteron and later Gueroult were teaching. He was deeply influenced by those of his teachers who had been adolescents during the time of the Dreyfus affair and for whom this issue assumed critical importance. Continuing his studies at Freiburg from I928-I929, he served an apprenticeship in phenomenology with Jean Hering. Subsequent encounters with Leon Brunschwicg and regular conversations with Gabriel Marcel served to distinguish, to sharpen and bring into the foreground, his own unique point of view. He also attests a long friendship with Jean Wahl. To gether with Henri Nerson he undertook a study of Talmudic sources under the guidance of a teacher who communicated the traditional Jewish mode of exegesis. It is no accident that Levinas begins his autobiographical account, which is indeed no more than a spare outline of events and formative influences, with the information that the Hebrew Bible directed his thinking from the time of his earliest child hood in Lithuania.
Author : Emmanuel Levinas
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 31,15 MB
Release : 2006-06-13
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780826490797
Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was a leading philosopher and Talmudic commentator. This book is a major collection of essays representing the culmination of Levinas's philosophy. It gathers his important work and reveals the development of his thought. It looks at issues of suffering, love, religion, culture, justice, human rights, and legal theory.
Author : Samuel Moyn
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 23,72 MB
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 9780801443947
In Origins of the Other, Moyn offers new readings of the work of a host of crucial thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth, Karl Lowith, Gabriel Marcel, Franz Rosenzweig, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Wahl, who help explain why Levinas's thought evolved as it did."--Jacket.
Author : Michael L. Morgan
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 39,63 MB
Release : 2016-05-09
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0253021189
Emmanuel Levinas conceives of our lives as fundamentally interpersonal and ethical, claiming that our responsibilities to one another should shape all of our actions. While many scholars believe that Levinas failed to develop a robust view of political ethics, Michael L. Morgan argues against understandings of Levinas's thought that find him politically wanting or even antipolitical. Morgan examines Levinas's ethical critique of the political as well as his Jewish writings—including those on Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state—which are controversial reflections of Levinas's political expression. Unlike others who dismiss Levinas as irrelevant or anarchical, Morgan is the first to give extensive treatment to Levinas as a serious social political thinker whose ethics must be understood in terms of its political implications. Morgan reveals Levinas's political commitments to liberalism and democracy as well as his revolutionary conception of human life as deeply interconnected on philosophical, political, and religious grounds.
Author : Catherine Chalier
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 32,91 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780801487941
Is it possible to apply a theoretical approach to ethics? The French philosopher Catherine Chalier addresses this question with an unusual combination of traditional ethics and continental philosophy. In a powerful argument for the necessity of moral reflection, Chalier counters the notion that morality can be derived from theoretical knowledge. Chalier analyzes the positions of two great moral philosophers, Kant and Levinas. While both are critical of an ethics founded on knowledge, their criticisms spring from distinctly different points of view. Chalier reexamines their conclusions, pitting Levinas against (and with) Kant, to interrogate the very foundations of moral philosophy and moral imperatives. She provides a clear, systematic comparison of their positions on essential ideas such as free will, happiness, freedom, and evil. Although based on a close and elegant presentation of Kant and Levinas, Chalier's book serves as a context for the development of the author's own reflections on the question "What am I supposed to do?" and its continued importance for contemporary philosophy.
Author : Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 12,93 MB
Release : 1997
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780810114814
Although Emmanuel Levinas is widely respected as one of the classic thinkers of our century, the debate about his place within Continental philosophy continues. In Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak shows Levinas's thought to be a persistent attempt to point beyond the borders of an economy where orderly interests and ways of reasoning make us feel at home--beyond the world of needs, beyond the self, beyond politics and administration, beyond logic and ontology, even beyond freedom and autonomy. Peperzak's examination begins with a general overview of Levinas's life and thought, and shows how issues of ethics, politics, and religion are intertwined in Levinas's philosophy. Peperzak also discusses the development of Levinas's relations with Husserl and Heidegger, demonstrating thematically the evolution of both Levinas's anti-Heideggerian view of technology and his critical attitude toward nature.
Author : John E. Drabinski
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 16,33 MB
Release : 2014-08-25
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1438452578
Investigates the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Heidegger in a nonpolemical context, engaging some of philosophys most pressing issues. Although both Levinas and Heidegger drew inspiration from Edmund Husserls phenomenological method and helped pave the way toward the post-structuralist movement of the late twentieth century, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation of these two thinkers. There are plenty of simpleand accurateoppositions and juxtapositions: French and German, ethics and ontology, and so on. But there is also a critical intersection between Levinas and Heidegger on some of the most fundamental philosophical questions: What does it mean to be, to think, and to act in late modern life and culture? How do our conceptions of subjectivity, time, and history both reflect the condition of this historical moment and open up possibilities for critique, resistance, and transformation? The contributors to this volume take up these questions by engaging the ideas of Levinas and Heidegger relating to issues of power, violence, secularization, history, language, time, death, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, and the boundary between the human and humanism.