Customer Reviews (1)

An early but central exposition of L.'s ethical metaphysics.
TIME AND THE OTHER was first presented as a series of lectures in 1946/47 at the College Philosophique, in the intellectually charged atmosphere of post-war Paris.Along with EXISTENCE AND EXISTENTS it represents the first book length formulation of Levinas's own philosophy of ethical metaphysics.It is not only a clear statement of his thought but is focused on the central issue of modern and contemporary philsopohy: the meaning and role of time.This volume also includes two important articles by Levinas on time, "The Old and the New" (1980) and "Diachrony and Representation" (1983).Reviewed by Richard A. Cohen (translator) ... Read more

Book Description
Emmanuel Levinas has been Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne and the director of the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale. Through such works as "Totality and Infinity" and "Otherwise than Being", he has exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century continental philosophy, providing inspiration for Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot and Irigaray. "The Levinas Reader" collects, often for the first time in English, essays by Levinas encompassing every aspect of his thought: the early phenomenological studies written under the guidance and inspiration of Husserl and Heidegger; the fully developed ethical critique of such totalizing philosophies; the pioneering texts on the moral dimension to aesthetics; the rich and subtle readings of the Talmud which are an exemplary model of an ethical, transcendental philosophy at work; the admirable meditations on current political issues. Sean Hand's introduction gives a complete overview of Levinas's work and situates each chapter within his general contribution to phenomenology, aesthetics, religion, politics and, above all, ethics. Each essay has been prefaced with a brief introduction presenting the basic issues and the necessary background, and suggesting ways to study the text further. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Revista de Filosofía, published by Thomson Gale on January 1, 2005. The length of the article is 2716 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Presentacion. (Emmanuel Levinas: Homenaje al cumplirse diez años de su muerte.
Author: Patricia Bonzi
Publication: Revista de Filosofía (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 61Page: 147(5)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes that each act of listening carries the secret of the text; the voice of Revelation, in precisely the inflection lent by each person's ear, is necessary for the truth of the Whole. Levinas's interpretive insights have already had a profound impact on European thought, both in the realm of ethics and of hermeneutics. This volume is the first in English to show how his contribution can also transform the ways we read biblical texts. The essays collected here introduce Levinas to those not familiar with his work and exemplify how his approach to texts illumines new and significant possibilities for reading the Bible afresh. ... Read more

Book Description
Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, two twentieth-century Jewish philosophers and two extremely provocative thinkers whose reputations have grown considerably, are rarely studied together. This is due to the disparate interests of many of their intellectual heirs. Strauss has influenced political theorists and policy makers on the right while Levinas has been championed in the humanities by different cadres associated with postmodernist thought. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation, Leora Batnitzky brings together these two seemingly incongruous contemporaries, demonstrating that they often had the same philosophical sources and their projects had many formal parallels. While such a comparison is valuable in itself for better understanding each figure, it also raises profound questions in the debate on the definitions of 'religion', suggestingways that religion makes claims on both philosophy and politics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Is faith in revelation reasonable?Yes!
This is a masterful work!The author not only enables us to understand the depths of the many works of Strauss and Levinas covering many decades, she also places us in touch with others who for more than two millennia have concerned themselves with the volatile relationships between the "truths" of philosophy and revelation, also doing the same with subsequent scholarship on the contributions and limitations of the thought of Strauss and Levinas.

Although the subtitle implies that philosophy plays a crucial role in our understanding of the dynamics of the relationship between religion and politics, from this text the reader will readily realize that history plays an even more dynamic role in this relationship. Having in mind the centrality of reason in philosophical discourse, this reader has an appreciation of a similarity between this reason and history, that while both are vitally necessary to our thought, neither is sufficient. Thus a role for a revelation that is at once historic and transcendent, a revelation that is reasonable, not susceptible to a reductive rationality.

While the author writes very clearly about the limits of historicism and for truth that is transhistorical, it seems to this reader that the notion of reason being discussed is that of an outdated faculty psychology.If we note that in the human species, evolution has become conscious of itself, and that we cultivate this consciousness, it seems reason is limited by the scant number of the varibles that impinge upon our daily lives for which we have the capacity to bring into conscious awareness, reason also limited by its temptation to rationalize our thoughts.These limitations provides space and time for revelation to play a role in our lives, leaving us with a faith that is reasonable.

The revelation that is at the center of this study is a Judaic notion of "law."Given my interest, as well as that of the author, in the larger context in which law is a text, I will utilize an often repeated phrase of her, to simply note that more is beyond the scope of this review.

I began to read this study because of my interest in Levinas and his appreciation of the otherness of others, sharing with the author an acute awareness that, while our receptivity to this otherness is a much needed corrective to a corrosive notion of rational autonomy, this receptivity is insufficiently political. Of Polish ancestry who twenty years ago led a study abroad semester contingent to Krakow, I became more acutely aware of how in 1945 the moment of liberation from Nazism became the moment of enslavement to Communism.In dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust and the emergence of Israel as a nation state, I share with the author some apprehension at the difficulty of our seeing in the Palestinian, the otherness of the other.

It is at this point that I also share with the author her appreciation of the awesome contribution of Leo Strauss to philosophy and the politics of revelation (pages 209-10):"On the one hand, Strauss did view the human predicament as tragic in that there will never be, according to him, the 'full reconciliation among fellow citizens.' Yet Strauss was not an advocate of tragic resignation but rather of dispelling what he took to be human fantasy ... that we fool ourselves, to our own detriment, by blindly believing our own pieties..."

... Read more

Book Description

Vigilant Memory focuses on the particular role of Emmanuel Levinas's thought in reasserting the ethical parameters for poststructuralist criticism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. More than simply situating Levinas's ethics within the larger context of his philosophy, R. Clifton Spargo offers a new explanation of its significance in relation to history.

In critical readings of the limits and also the heretofore untapped possibilities of Levinasian ethics, Spargo explores the impact of the Holocaust on Levinas's various figures of injustice while examining the place of mourning, the bad conscience, the victim, and the stranger/neighbor as they appear in Levinas's work. Ultimately, Spargo ranges beyond Levinas's explicit philosophical or implicit political positions to calculate the necessary function of the "memory of injustice" in our cultural and political discourses on the characteristics of a just society.

In this original and magisterial study, Spargo uses Levinas's work to approach our understanding of the suffering and death of others, and in doing so reintroduces an essential ethical element to the reading of literature, culture, and everyday life.

Customer Reviews (1)

An excellent study on contemporary ethical theory
Spargo (English, Marquette University), author of _The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature_, here undertakes a project much larger and more ambitious than this volume's title would indicate. He succeeds in the endeavor to reground ethical and political behavior in the present age, with the ethical metaphysics of Levinas and the "memory of injustice" serving as common points of departure. Extremely erudite and well-researched, Vigilant Memory advocates the standpoint, emerging from a critical rereading of Levinas, of "ethics as critique." This unique perspective criticizes cultural, social, and political practices from the point of view of the ethical, i.e. the face-to-face relationship. One's caring for the suffering Other individual is anterior to public policy decisions. "Ethical critique" thus serves as a perpetual critique of existing polities. This revolution of traditional thinking signals nothing less than a Copernican shift in moral theory. Spargo's volume joins a burgeoning number of texts that use Levinas's thought to conceptualize an ethically-informed social-political theory. Additionally, the author's unique interdisciplinary approach to the subject matter culls more critical resources than traditional exegetes of Levinas have been comfortable to examine and utilize. ... Read more

Book Description
This book examines the implication of Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy of ethics for the theory, criticism, and practice of human communication. ... Read more

Book Description
From the relative obscurity in which Levinas's work languished until very recently, Emmanuel Levinas must now be judged as one of the most influential figures in contemporary Continental philosophy.There is no better guide than John Lewelyn to lead one through the thickets of Levinas's prose.Bursting with questions, multiple references, cascading citations and multilingual puns and nuances, this book is the compelling record of intellectual obsession.Taking as its guiding thre

the theme of genealogy, the book gives a broadly chronological and impressively manageable presentation of the whole sweep of the Levinas's work. Balanced and finely grained, Llewelyn confronts questions of method, Heidegger, phenomenology, the theme of sensibility, religion, enjoyment, feminity, eros, justice and the political. The book reaches a stunning climax in a series of chapters that give a hestitant but tolerant discussion of the question of God in Levinas, the relation to Levinasian ethics to Nietzschean genealogy, and an extraordinary discussion of metaphor that leads into a wholly original analysis of Levinas's poetics and metaphorics.The book concludes with a sensitive reading of the autobiographical epigraphs to Levinas's Otherwise than Being... and a consideration of the Holocaust. ... Read more

Book Description
The Face of the Other and the Trace of God contain essays on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and how his philosophy intersects with that of other philosophers, particularly Husserl, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Derrida. This collection is broadly divided into two parts: relations with the other, and the questions of God. ... Read more