Emmanuel Levinas

1906-1995 · Lithuanian-born French · Ethics, Phenomenology, Jewish Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion

I am responsible for the Other, even for the responsibility of the Other.

Born in Kaunas, Lithuania, Levinas arrived in France in 1923 and studied with Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg — the two thinkers he would spend his life indebted to and against. A French citizen from 1930, he was captured as a soldier in 1940 and spent the war as a Jewish prisoner of war while his Lithuanian family was murdered. Biography and philosophy are inseparable.

Topics Emmanuel Levinas addresses

• ethics as first philosophy
• the face of the Other
• asymmetry of responsibility
• substitution and the subject as hostage
• the saying and the said
• totality and infinity
• the idea of the infinite
• the third and justice
• the il y a
• hypostasis
• dwelling and enjoyment
• the feminine and eros
• fecundity and paternity
• diachrony and the immemorial past
• illeity and the trace
• à-Dieu and transcendence
• responsibility older than freedom
• persecution and obsession
• me voici
• proximity and sensibility
• critique of Heidegger on ontology
• critique of Husserl on intentionality
• the philosophy of Hitlerism
• useless suffering

Converse with Emmanuel Levinas on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Emmanuel Levinas's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.