First published in 1947, and written mostly during Levinas's imprisonment during World War II, this work provides the first sketch of his mature thoughtlater developed in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence. This is essential reading for understanding both Levinas's own philosophy and the developments in philosophical thought in the twentieth century.
Influenced in part by the dialogical philosophies of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber,Totality and Infinity departs from the ethically neutral tradition of ontology to analyze the "face-to-face" relation with the Other. First published in English by Duquesne in 1969, this has become one of the classics of modern philosophy. Fully indexed.
Combining elements from Heidegger’s philosophy of “being-in-the-world” and the tradition of Jewish theology, Levinas has evolved a new type of ethics based on a concept of “the Other” in two different but complementary aspects. He describes his encounters with those philosophers and literary authors (most of them his contemporaries) whose writings have most significantly contributed t…
This book consists of transcripts from two lecture courses Levinas delivered in 1975-76, his last year at the Sorbonne. They cover some of the most pervasive themes of his thought and were written at a time when he had just published his most important—and difficult—book, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Both courses pursue issues related to the question at the heart of Levinas's th…
One of the most influential philosophers of our day has selected 16 previously uncollected pieces that are unified by Levinas's project of revising the phenomenological description of the world in light of our experience of other persons.
Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, first published in 1974, is the second of Levinas's mature philosophical works, the first being Totality and Infinity (first published in 1961). Otherwise than Being is essentially the sequel to Totality and Infinity, further elaborating the rich and comprehensive philosophy of ethical metaphysics that Levinas had introduced in the earlier work. At the h…
Internationally renowned as one of the great French philosophers of the twentieth century, the late Emmanuel Levinas remains a pivotal figure across the humanistic disciplines for his insistence―against the grain of Western philosophical tradition―on the primacy of ethics in philosophical investigation. This first English translation of a series of twelve essays known as Alterity and Transc…