Face to Face with Levinas
Publication Year: 1986
Published by: State University of New York Press
Cover
Title and Copyright
Contents
Download PDF (50.8 KB)
pp. v-vi
Preface
Download PDF (92.8 KB)
pp. vii-viii
Levinas has written his own brief intellectual bibliography, "Signature."1 His biography, complete up to 1981, can be found in Emmanuel Levinas by Roger Burggraeve.2
Acknowledgments
Download PDF (102.6 KB)
pp. ix-x
Key to Abbreviations
Download PDF (40.9 KB)
pp. xi-
Introduction
Download PDF (803.7 KB)
pp. 1-10
Is an ethical philosophy primarily philosophical, a true discourse that happens to be about moral phenomena? Or is such a philosophy primarily ethical, an edifying discourse designed to stimulate good behavior, an exhortation, instruction or prescription rather than an explanation,...
Part I: Proximity
1. Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas
Download PDF (1.6 MB)
pp. 13-33
Richard Kearney: Perhaps you could retrace your philosophical itinerary by identifying some of the major influences on your thought? ...
2. Bad Conscience and the Inexorable
Download PDF (494.1 KB)
pp. 35-40
1. Starting with intentionality, consciousness is understood as a modality of the voluntary. The word intention suggests this, and thus the label acts conferred on the unities of intentional consciousness is justified. On the other hand, the...
3. Our Clandestine Companion
Download PDF (780.7 KB)
pp. 41-50
Twenty years ago Levinas wrote, "For everyone, this century will have witnessed the end of philosophy" — yet, by ending this very same phrase with an exclamation point, he modified and possibly reversed its sense. This punctual addition was particularly welcome since, having been...
Part II: From Ethics to Philosophy
4. Reason as One for Another: Moral and Theoretical Argument
Download PDF (1.4 MB)
pp. 53-72
Emmanuel Levinas has represented the divine claim of the moral life, "otherwise than being:' by the idea of the absolutely other. His uncompromising treatment of the otherness of God and neighbor seems, however, to negate the minimum conditions of sense and reason, posing a...
5. Levinas' Question
Download PDF (761.0 KB)
pp. 73-82
"How does he do it?" The question of method continually nags at anyone reading Totality and Infinity for the first time. How can Levinas be so aggravatingly profound and yet still retain any semblance of philosophical rigor? ...
6. An Ethical Transcendental Philosophy
Download PDF (2.6 MB)
pp. 83-115
To speak of the philosophy of Levinas as a transcendental philosophy seems paradoxical — indeed, a form of imperialism against a thinker who rejects any and every transcendental philosophy. Doesn't the transcendental method imply that philosophy is based upon the...
7. Levinas' Logic
Download PDF (3.3 MB)
pp. 117-158
The following lines of thought are part of a study that is in progress, aiming to establish that prescriptive statements are not commensurable with denotative ones — or in other words, with descriptive ones. We begin by examining the situation of Levinas' thought in the face of...
8. Skepticism and Reason
Download PDF (1.6 MB)
pp. 159-179
In his article "De la signifiance du sens;' Levinas says that he would like "briefly to consider further the contradiction of principle which would arise in affirming the independence of ethical intelligibility both from theoretical thought and being, within a discourse that is itself theoretical."1 ...
9. Levinas and Derrida: The Question of the Closure of Metaphysics
Download PDF (1.7 MB)
pp. 181-202
The notion of the end of philosophy underlies all of Derrida's writings. This is never more explicit than at the beginning of the essay "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas," where he announces the questions he brings to his reading of Levinas.2 ...
Part III: Contexts
10. Some Remarks on Hegel, Kant, and Levinas
Download PDF (1.0 MB)
pp. 205-217
Although most pages of Totality and Infinity quote Heidegger or allude to his work, it is obvious that Hegel's "system of philosophy" is a paradigmatic case of the "totalitarian" philosophy attacked by Levinas, whereas it is not immediately clear whether his criticism does...
11. The Sensuality and the Sensitivity
Download PDF (960.3 KB)
pp. 219-230
To sense something is to catch on to the sense of something, its direction, orientation, or meaning. Sensibility is sense perception, apprehension of sense. In addition, to sense something is to be sensitive to something, to be concerned by it, affected by it. ...
12. The Fecundity of the Caress
Download PDF (2.0 MB)
pp. 231-256
On the horizon of a story is found, once again, that which was in the beginning: this naive, or native, sense of a touch, in which the subject does not yet exist. Submerged in pathos or aisthesz's: astonishment, admiration, sometimes terror, before that which surrounds it. ...
Selected Bibliography
Download PDF (66.7 KB)
pp. 257-258
Contributors
Download PDF (143.8 KB)
pp. 259-261
Index [Includes Back Cover]
Download PDF (5.4 MB)
pp. 263-264
E-ISBN-13: 9780791499368
E-ISBN-10: 791499367
Print-ISBN-13: 9780887062582
Print-ISBN-10: 088706258X
Page Count: 264
Publication Year: 1986
Series Title: SUNY Series in Philosophy (discontinued)
Series Editor Byline: Robert Cummings Neville
