Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas (January 12, 1906 - December 25, 1995) was a Jewish philosopher originally from Kaunas in Lithuania, who moved to France where he wrote most of his works in French. He was naturalized in 1930.

Levinas was deeply influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, whom he met at the university of Freiburg, as well as by Jewish religion. He was one of the first intellectuals to introduce to France the work of Heidegger and Husserl, by translations (for example of Husserl's 'Cartesian Meditations') and original philosophical tracts. After the Second World War, Levinas became a leading thinker in France.

Levinas work is based on the ethics of the Other. The Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object, as is done by traditional metaphysics (called ontology by Levinas). Some of his work is rather hard to understand, but one could say that Levinas prefers to think of philosophy as the 'knowledge of love' rather than the love of knowledge. In his arrangement, an ethics of responsibility precedes any 'objective searching after truth'. Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the face-to-face encounter with another human being is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's promixity and distance are both strongly felt. The encounter makes clear the other person's unknowable difference, a fact which, for Levinas, compels us to respond to them: the encounter leads to a call of responsibility.

Among the many works of Levinas, key texts include Totalité et infini: essai sur l'extériorité (1961) and Autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de l'essence (1974)

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