Emmanuel Levinas and the Limits to Ethics

Emmanuel Levinas and the Limits to Ethics

Author: Aryeh Botwinick

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-17

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1134750420

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Emanuel Levinas and the Limits to Ethics highlights how radically different Jewish ethics is from Christian ethics, and the profound affinities that subsist between Jewish ethics and philosophical and political liberalism. The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas has captured the imagination of a global constituency who take his absolutizing of ethical demands and his assigning primacy to ethics over all other branches of inquiry in his mapping of Western philosophy to be indicative of a major re-ordering of both personal and cultural identity. It is this re-ordering, they believe, that would restore greater wholeness and value to human life. In this book, Aryeh Botwinick takes issue with both the theoretical analysis that Levinas engages in, and the practical ethical import that he draws from it. Arguing that what Levinas has to say about both skepticism and negative theology can be used to re-route his argument away from the avowed aims of his thought, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Jewish Studies, Ethics and Philosophy.


The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas

The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas

Author: Diane Perpich

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0804759421

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This work offers a new interpretation of what Levinas means when he says that we are infinitely responsible to the other person.


Entre Nous

Entre Nous

Author: Emmanuel Levinas

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2006-06-13

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780826490797

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Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was a leading philosopher and Talmudic commentator. This book is a major collection of essays representing the culmination of Levinas's philosophy. It gathers his important work and reveals the development of his thought. It looks at issues of suffering, love, religion, culture, justice, human rights, and legal theory.


Vigilant Memory

Vigilant Memory

Author: R. Clifton Spargo

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2006-09

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780801883118

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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.


Facing the Other

Facing the Other

Author: Sean Hand

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-04

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1317832493

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Emmanuel Levinas is one of the key philosophers in the post-Heideggerian field and an increasingly central presence in contemporary debates about identity and responsibility. His work spans and encapsulates the major philosophical and ethical concerns of the twentieth century, combining the insights of a basic phenomenological training with the demands of a Jewish culture and its basis in the endless exegesis of Talmudic reading. His concerns and subjects are wide: they include the Other, the body, infinity, women, Jewish-Christian relations, Zionism and the impulses and limits of philosophical language itself. This collection explicates Levinas's major contribution to these debates, namely the idea of the primacy of ethics over ontology or epistemology. It investigates how, in the wake of a post-structuralist orthodoxy, scholars and practitioners in such fields as literary theory, cultural studies, feminism and psychoanalysis are turning to Levinas's work to articulate a rediscovered concern with the ethical dimension of their discipline. Stressing the largely assumed but unexplored Jewish dimension of Levinas's work, this book is an important contribution to the field of Jewish studies and philosophy.


Between Levinas and Heidegger

Between Levinas and Heidegger

Author: John E. Drabinski

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2014-08-25

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1438452594

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Although both Levinas and Heidegger drew inspiration from Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method and helped pave the way toward the post-structuralist movement of the late twentieth century, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation of these two thinkers. There are plenty of simple—and accurate—oppositions and juxtapositions: French and German, ethics and ontology, and so on. But there is also a critical intersection between Levinas and Heidegger on some of the most fundamental philosophical questions: What does it mean to be, to think, and to act in late modern life and culture? How do our conceptions of subjectivity, time, and history both reflect the condition of this historical moment and open up possibilities for critique, resistance, and transformation? The contributors to this volume take up these questions by engaging the ideas of Levinas and Heidegger relating to issues of power, violence, secularization, history, language, time, death, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, and the boundary between the human and humanism.


Worldly Ethics

Worldly Ethics

Author: Ella Myers

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2013-02-26

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0822353997

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What is the spirit that animates collective action? What is the ethos of democracy? Worldly Ethics offers a powerful and original response to these questions, arguing that associative democratic politics, in which citizens join together and struggle to shape shared conditions, requires a world-centered ethos. This distinctive ethos, Ella Myers shows, involves care for "worldly things," which are the common and contentious objects of concern around which democratic actors mobilize. In articulating the meaning of worldly ethics, she reveals the limits of previous modes of ethics, including Michel Foucault's therapeutic model, based on a "care of the self," and Emmanuel Levinas's charitable model, based on care for the Other. Myers contends that these approaches occlude the worldly character of political life and are therefore unlikely to inspire and support collective democratic activity. The alternative ethics she proposes is informed by Hannah Arendt's notion of amor mundi, or love of the world, and it focuses on the ways democratic actors align around issues, goals, or things in the world, practicing collaborative care for them. Myers sees worldly ethics as a resource that can inspire and motivate ordinary citizens to participate in democratic politics, and the book highlights civic organizations that already embody its principles.


Death, Time and the Other

Death, Time and the Other

Author: Saitya Brata Das

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-01-27

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9811510903

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This book addresses the limits of metaphysics and the question of the possibility of ethics in this context. It is divided into six chapters, the first of which broadens readers’ understanding of difference as difference with specific reference to the works of Hegel. The second chapter discusses the works of Emmanuel Lévinas and the question of the ethical. In turn, the concepts of sovereignty and the eternal return are discussed in chapters three and four, while chapter five poses the question of literature in a new way. The book concludes with chapter six. The book represents an important contribution to the field of contemporary philosophical debates on the possibility of ethics beyond all possible metaphysical and political closures. As such, it will be of interest to scholars and researchers in both the humanities and social sciences. Beyond the academic world, the book will also appeal to readers (journalists, intellectuals, social activists, etc.) for whom the question of the ethical is the decisive question of our time.


The Ambiguity of Justice: New Perspectives on Paul Ricoeur's Approach to Justice

The Ambiguity of Justice: New Perspectives on Paul Ricoeur's Approach to Justice

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-07-13

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 9004424989

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The Ambiguity of Justice offers a collection of essays on Ricoeur’s thought on justice, and on the different views that influenced this thought, in particular those of Arendt, Honneth, Hénaff, Rawls, Levinas and Boltanski. Although Ricoeur’s idea of justice has undoubtedly caught much attention already, only a few monographs have been published so far that explicitly address this topic. The contributors of this book – a mix of both well-established Ricoeur scholars and young promising scholars in this field – address the difficulties in Ricoeur’s thought on justice by maintaining his spirit of dialogue, not only by showing how Ricoeur himself repeatedly searches for dialogue in his writings on justice, but also by arguing that Ricoeur’s thought allows contributions to contemporary debates about justice.


Performing Ethics Through Film Style

Performing Ethics Through Film Style

Author: Edward Lamberti

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2019-11-06

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1474444024

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Proposing a relationship between Levinasian ethics and film style, and bringing it into a productive dialogue with theories of performativity, this book explores this influence through three directorial bodies of work: those of Barbet Schroeder, Paul Schrader and the Dardenne Brothers.