Addressing Levinas

Addressing Levinas PDF

Author: Eric Sean Nelson

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2005-08-02

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 0810120488

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

At a time of great and increasing interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this volume draws readers into what Levinas described as "philosophy itself"—"a discourse always addressed to another." Thus the philosopher himself provides the thread that runs through these essays on his writings, one guided by the importance of the fact of being addressed—the significance of the Saying much more than the Said. The authors, leading Levinas scholars and interpreters from across the globe, explore the philosopher's relationship to a wide range of intellectual traditions, including theology, philosophy of culture, Jewish thought, phenomenology, and the history of philosophy. They also engage Levinas's contribution to ethics, politics, law, justice, psychoanalysis and epistemology, among other themes. In their radical singularity, these essays reveal the inalienable alterity at the heart of Levinas's ethics. At the same time, each essay remains open to the others, and to the perspectives and positions they advocate. Thus the volume, in its quality and diversity, enacts an authentic encounter with Levinas's thought, embodying an intellectual ethics by virtue of its style. Bringing together contributions from philosophy, theology, literary theory, gender studies, and political theory, this book offers a deeper and more thorough encounter with Levinas's ethics than any yet written.

Levinas's Existential Analytic

Levinas's Existential Analytic PDF

Author: James R. Mensch

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2015-01-30

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0810130548

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

By virtue of the originality and depth of its thought, Emmanuel Levinas’s masterpiece, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, is destined to endure as one of the great works of philosophy. It is an essential text for understanding Levinas’s discussion of “the Other,” yet it is known as a “difficult” book. Modeled after Norman Kemp Smith’s commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Levinas’s Existential Analytic guides both new and experienced readers through Levinas’s text. James R. Mensch explicates Levinas’s arguments and shows their historical referents, particularly with regard to Heidegger, Husserl, and Derrida. Students using this book alongside Totality and Infinity will be able to follow its arguments and grasp the subtle phenomenological analyses that fill it.

The Cambridge Companion to Levinas

The Cambridge Companion to Levinas PDF

Author: Simon Critchley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-07-25

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9780521665650

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A convenient and accessible guide to Levinas, first published in 2002, which emphasises the interdisciplinary significance of his work.

Levinas' 'Totality and Infinity'

Levinas' 'Totality and Infinity' PDF

Author: William Large

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-07-30

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1472531884

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Emmanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity is a monumental work of phenomenological enquiry that goes on to assert the centrality of ethics to philosophical thought. This Reader's Guide provides a detailed explanation of the work, breaking down the occasionally intimidating but always inspirational content of Totality and Infinity for non-specialist readers, unpacking the complexities of Levinas' thought with clarity and rigour. Ideal for students coming to Levinas for the first time, the book offers essential guidance, outlining key themes, approaches to reading the text, the reception, and influence of the work, and recommends secondary reading materials.

The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas

The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas PDF

Author: Diane Perpich

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0804759421

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This work offers a new interpretation of what Levinas means when he says that we are infinitely responsible to the other person.

To the Other

To the Other PDF

Author: Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9781557530240

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"The best introduction available for students of one of the most important philosophers of this century."--"American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly." (Philosophy)

The Problem with Levinas

The Problem with Levinas PDF

Author: Simon Critchley

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 0198738765

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Levinas and the Torah

Levinas and the Torah PDF

Author: Richard I. Sugarman

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2019-08-23

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 1438475748

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) was one of the most original Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. This book interprets the Hebrew Bible through the lens of Levinas's religious philosophy. Richard I. Sugarman examines the Pentateuch using a phenomenological approach, drawing on both Levinas's philosophical and Jewish writings. Sugarman puts Levinas in conversation with biblical commentators both classical and modern, including Rashi, Maimonides, Sforno, Hirsch, and Soloveitchik. He particularly highlights Levinas's work on the Talmud and the Holocaust. Levinas's reading is situated against the background of a renewed understanding of such phenomena as covenant, promise, different modalities of time, and justice. The volume is organized to reflect the fifty-four portions of the Torah read during the Jewish liturgical year. A preface provides an overview of Levinas's life, approach, and place in contemporary Jewish thought. The reader emerges with a deeper understanding of both the Torah and the philosophy of a key Jewish thinker.

The Oxford Handbook of Levinas

The Oxford Handbook of Levinas PDF

Author: Michael L. Morgan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-04-10

Total Pages: 800

ISBN-13: 0190910682

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) 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.

Levinas and the Trauma of Responsibility

Levinas and the Trauma of Responsibility PDF

Author: Cynthia D. Coe

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2018-03-12

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0253031982

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Levinas's account of responsibility challenges dominant notions of time, autonomy, and subjectivity according to Cynthia D. Coe. Employing the concept of trauma in Levinas's late writings, Coe draws together his understanding of time and his claim that responsibility is an obligation to the other that cannot be anticipated or warded off. Tracing the broad significance of these ideas, Coe shows how Levinas revises our notions of moral agency, knowledge, and embodiment. Her focus on time brings a new interpretive lens to Levinas's work and reflects on a wider discussion of the fragmentation of human experience as an ethical subject. Coe's understanding of trauma and time offers a new appreciation of how Levinas can inform debates about gender, race, mortality, and animality.