Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) stands in the great tradition of phenomenology that stretches from Edmund Husserl to Martin Heidegger. His emphasis on the importance of the ‘Other’ in ethics has had a huge impact in continental philosophy, literature and religious studies. However, Levinas’s preoccupation with the idea of ‘ethics as first philosophy’, combined with the challenging nature of his prose and terminology, have tended to obscure his important contributions to mainstream philosophy.

In this outstanding introduction Michael Morgan examines and assesses Levinas for those coming to his work for the first time. Beginning with an overview of Levinas’s life and times he discusses the following fundamental aspects of Levinas’s thought

• Phenomenology and transcendental philosophy: the significance of Kant, Husserl and Heidegger in Levinas’s philosophy and the origins of his theory of otherness
• The ideas and themes in Totality and Infinity, including Levinas’s discussion of eschatology and messianism and his introduction of the face-to-face relation as the primary dimension of ethical value
• Levinas’s application of the face-to-face relation to political, moral and epistemological problems and the novel expressions used by Levinas to describe them, such as trace, illeity and diachrony
• The problem of the authority of the ethical, the relation between the ethical and time, and how the ethical involves human freedom, responsibility and identity
• The ideas in Levinas’s second major work, Otherwise than Being, particularly his theories of self and subjectivity and the interdependence between interpersonal, ethical responsibility and the political domain of justice
• Levinas’s philosophical legacy, including the contribution of his ideas to contemporary discussions about the sources of normativity in ethics and the dialogical nature of ethical inquiry

Including chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary of technical terms this is an ideal introduction to Levinas’s thought for anyone coming to his work for the first time. It will be essential reading for students in philosophy as well as related disciplines such as religion, theology, Jewish studies and literature.