Emmanuel Lévinas

Emmanuel Lévinas (January 12, 1906 - December 25, 1995) was a Jewish philosopher born in Kaunas, Lithuania, who moved to France, where he wrote most of his works. In his youth he had received a traditional Jewish education, including Talmud. He was naturalized in 1930.

See also

• The Other
• Authenticity
• Golden Rule

The above description is not completely accurate. In Levinas's later thought following "Totality and Infnity", he argued that our responsiblity for-the-other was already rooted within our subjective constitution. This can be seen most clearly in his later account of recurrence (chapter 4 from "Otherwise Than Being"). Therein Levinas maintained that subjectivity was formed in and through our subjected-ness to the other. In this way, his effort was not to move away from traditional attempts to locate the other within subjectivity (this he agrees with), so much as his view was that subjectivity was primordially ethical and not theoretical. That is to say, our responsibility for-the-other was not a derivative feature of our subjectivity; instead, obligation founds our subjective being-in-the-world by giving it a meaningful direction and orientation. Levinas's thesis "ethics is first philosophy", then, means that the traditional philosophical pursuit of knowledge is but a secondary feature of a more basic ethical duty to-the-other.

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