Discovering Levinas

Discovering Levinas PDF

Author: Michael L. Morgan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-05-28

Total Pages: 47

ISBN-13: 1139464736

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In Discovering Levinas, Michael L. Morgan shows how this thinker faces in novel and provocative ways central philosophical problems of twentieth-century philosophy and religious thought. He tackles this task by placing Levinas in conversation with philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Onora O'Neill, Charles Taylor, and Cora Diamond. He also seeks to understand Levinas within philosophical, religious, and political developments in the history of twentieth-century intellectual culture. Morgan demystifies Levinas by examining his unfamiliar and surprising vocabulary, interpreting texts with an eye to clarity, and arguing that Levinas can be understood as a philosopher of the everyday. Morgan also shows that Levinas's ethics is not morally and politically irrelevant nor is it excessively narrow and demanding in unacceptable ways. Neither glib dismissal nor fawning acceptance, this book provides a sympathetic reading that can form a foundation for a responsible critique.

Discovering Existence with Husserl

Discovering Existence with Husserl PDF

Author: Emmanuel Levinas

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1998-07-22

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0810113619

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This volume collects most of Levinas' articles on Husserlian phenomenology, gathering together a wealth of exposition and interpretation by one of the most important 20th century European philosophers.

The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas

The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas PDF

Author: Michael L. Morgan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-03-14

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 113949807X

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This book provides a clear and helpful overview of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, one of the most significant and interesting philosophers of the late twentieth century. Michael L. Morgan presents an overall interpretation of Levinas' central principle that human existence is fundamentally ethical and that its ethical character is grounded in our face-to-face relationships. He explores the religious, cultural and political implications of this insight for modern Western culture and how it relates to our conception of selfhood and what it is to be a person, our understanding of the ground of moral values, our experience of time and the meaning of history, and our experience of religious concepts and discourse. Includes an annotated list of recommended readings and a selected bibliography of books by and about Levinas. An excellent introduction to Levinas for readers unfamiliar with his work and even for those without a background in philosophy.

Discovering Levinas

Discovering Levinas PDF

Author: Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies Michael L Morgan

Publisher:

Published: 2014-05-14

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 9780511290473

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In Discovering Levinas, Michael L. Morgan shows how this thinker faces in novel and provocative ways central philosophical problems of twentieth-century philosophy and religious thought. He tackles this task by placing Levinas in conversation with philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Onora O'Neill, Charles Taylor, and Cora Diamond. He also seeks to understand Levinas within philosophical, religious, and political developments in the history of twentieth-century intellectual culture. Morgan demystifies Levinas by examining his unfamiliar and surprising vocabulary, interpreting texts with an eye to clarity, and arguing that Levinas can be understood as a philosopher of the everyday. Morgan also shows that Levinas's ethics is not morally and politically irrelevant nor is it excessively narrow and demanding in unacceptable ways. Neither glib dismissal nor fawning acceptance, this book provides a sympathetic reading that can form a foundation for a responsible critique.

Levinas Unhinged

Levinas Unhinged PDF

Author: Tom Sparrow

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2013-06-28

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1782790578

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Through six heterodox essays this book extracts a materialist account of subjectivity and aesthetics from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. More than a work of academic commentary that would leave many of Levinas s pious commentators aghast, Sparrow exhibits an aspect of Levinas which is darker, yet no less fundamental, than his ethical and theological guises. This darkened Levinas provides answers to problems in aesthetics, speculative philosophy, ecology, ethics, and philosophy of race, problems which not only trouble scholars, but which haunt anyone who insists that the material of existence is the beginning and end of existence itself.

The Phenomenology of Moral Normativity

The Phenomenology of Moral Normativity PDF

Author: William H. Smith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-02-28

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1136487255

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Why should I be moral? Philosophers have long been concerned with the legitimacy of morality’s claim on us—especially its ostensible aim to motivate certain actions of all persons unconditionally. This problem of moral normativity has received extensive treatment in analytic moral theory, but little attention has been paid to the potential contribution that phenomenology might make to this central debate in metaethics. In The Phenomenology of Moral Normativity, William H. Smith takes up the question of morality’s legitimacy anew, drawing contemporary moral philosophers into conversation with the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas. Utilizing a two-part account of moral normativity, Smith contends that the ground of morality itself is second-personal—rooted in the ethical demand intrinsic to other persons —while the ground for particular moral-obligations is first-personal—rooted in the subject’s avowal or endorsement of certain moral norms within a concrete historical situation. Thus, Smith argues, phenomenological analysis allows us to make sense of an idea that has long held intuitive appeal, but that modern moral philosophy has been unable to render satisfactorily: namely, that the normative source of valid moral claims is simply other persons and what we owe to them.

Levinas Faces Biblical Figures

Levinas Faces Biblical Figures PDF

Author: Yael Lin

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2014-03-20

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0739182838

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This collection of essays is an attempt to capture the drama of the encounter, of the 'facing' of Levinas and the biblical text. It seeks to link Jewish experience and Levinasian themes such as responsibility, substitution, hospitality, suffering and forgiveness, and at the same time make the biblical text accessible in a new way. The book offers new insights on the opening up of Levinas's thought and biblical stories to one another; it considers the ways in which Levinas can open up the biblical text to requestioning, and how the biblical text can inform our reading of Levinas. Setting up in dialogue the heteronomic texts – the narrative texts of the bible and Levinas's philosophical texts – allows an enforced and renewed understanding of both. The examination of these issues is pursued from diverse perspectives and disciplines, probing the role biblical figures play in Levinas's thought and the manner by which to approach them. Do the biblical allusions serve in Levinas's thought merely as a rhetorical and literary device, as illustrations of his ideas, or perhaps they have a deeper philosophical meaning, which contributes to his project in general? Do the references to biblical figures work in Levinas's philosophy in a way that other literary figures are incapable of, and how do these references comply with his conflicted attitude towards literature?

Nine Talmudic Readings

Nine Talmudic Readings PDF

Author: Emmanuel Levinas

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-05-16

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0253040507

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These nine masterful readings of the Talmud by the renowned French Jewish philosopher translate Jewish thought into the language of modern times. One of the major continental philosophers of the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas was also an important Talmudic commentator. Between 1963 and 1975, he delivered an enlightening and influential series of commentaries at the annual Talmudic colloquia of a group of French Jewish intellectuals in Paris. In this collection, Levinas applies a hermeneutic that simultaneously allows the classic Jewish texts to shed light on contemporary problems and lets modern problems illuminate the texts. Besides being quintessential illustrations of the art of reading, the essays express the deeply ethical vision of the human condition that makes Levinas one of the most important thinkers of our time.

Humanism of the Other

Humanism of the Other PDF

Author: Emmanuel Lévinas

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 9780252028403

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This work, a philosophical reaction to prevailing nihilism in the 1960's is urgent reading today when a new sort of nihilism, parading in the very garments of humanism, threatens to engulf our civilization. ---- A key text in Levinas' work, introduces the concept of the humanity of each human being as only understood and discovered through understanding the humanity of others first.

To the Other

To the Other PDF

Author: Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9781557530240

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