Emmanuel Lévinas, (born Dec. 30, 1905 [Jan. 12, 1906, Old Style], Kaunas, Lith.—died Dec. 25, 1995, Paris, France), French philosopher. He studied at the Universities of Strasbourg and Freiburg and received a doctorate in philosophy from the Institut de France in 1928. His philosophical work in the 1930s helped to introduce the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger to France. Lévinas’s best-known work, Totality and Infinity (1961), is a highly original phenomenological investigation of ethics and the self that takes as its starting point the face-to-face encounter between the “I” and the “Other.” Extensively developed in Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence (1974) and other writings, this analysis challenged Western philosophical tradition by treating ethics rather than ontology as “first philosophy.” Lévinas was also the author of religious studies, including Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (1963) and Nine Talmudic Readings (1990).
Emmanuel Lévinas Article
Emmanuel Lévinas summary
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Judaism Summary
Judaism, monotheistic religion developed among the ancient Hebrews. Judaism is characterized by a belief in one transcendent God who revealed himself to Abraham, Moses, and the Hebrew prophets and by a religious life in accordance with Scriptures and rabbinic traditions. Judaism is the complex
ontology Summary
Ontology, the philosophical study of being in general, or of what applies neutrally to everything that is real. It was called “first philosophy” by Aristotle in Book IV of his Metaphysics. The Latin term ontologia (“science of being”) was felicitously invented by the German philosopher Jacob
ethics Summary
Ethics, the discipline concerned with what is morally good and bad and morally right and wrong. The term is also applied to any system or theory of moral values or principles. (Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Peter Singer.) How should we live? Shall we aim at happiness or at knowledge,