Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) was one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. His work influencing a wide range of intellectuals such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Jean-Luc Marion.

A Levinasian commentary on the Torah. The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) was one of the most original Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. This book interprets the Hebrew Bible through the lens of Levinas’s religious philosophy. Richard I. Sugarman examines the Pentateuch using a phenomenological approach, drawing on both Levinas’s philosophical and Jewish writings. Sugarman puts Levinas in conversation with biblical commentators both classical and modern, including Rashi, Maimonides, Sforno, Hirsch, and Soloveitchik. He particularly highlights Levinas’s work on the Talmud and the Holocaust. Levinas’s reading is situated against the background of a renewed understanding of such phenomena as covenant, promise, different modalities of time, and justice. The volume is organized to reflect the fifty-four portions of the Torah read during the Jewish liturgical year. A preface provides an overview of Levinas’s life, approach, and place in contemporary Jewish thought. The reader emerges with a deeper understanding of both the Torah and the philosophy of a key Jewish thinker. “Sugarman rightly treats Levinas as a thoroughly Jewish religious thinker, an approach to the great thinker that is much needed. Taking such an approach, he opens up new, innovative horizons in Torah commentary and analysis. Through a perceptive reading of Levinas through the biblical lens, he offers an insightful illumination of both the Bible and Levinas. Some may not be sure what to make of Sugarman’s work here, but then that is how it always is with innovative approaches.” — David Patterson, author of The Holocaust and the Nonrepresentable: Literary and Photographic Transcendence

Is Emmanuel Levinas a dismissive critic of Husserlian phenomenology, or an important member of its movement? The standard account of Levinas's work assumes his distance from Husserl. In opposition to this account, Sensibility and Singularity contends that Husserl was a vital, living resource for Levinas throughout his philosophical career. The singularity of the Other is the centerpiece of Levinas's thought. The philosophical significance of this singularity, however, cannot be fully appreciated without attending to Levinas's transformation of the Husserlian themes of time, materiality, intentionality, and sense. This book documents those transformations and establishes their centrality to Levinas's notion of ethics. What emerges from this reading is a thorough account of Levinas's constant and productive debate with the Husserlian tradition of phenomenology.

Investigates the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Heidegger in a nonpolemical context, engaging some of philosophy’s most pressing issues. 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.

Levinas writes that Rosenzweig is too present in his work to be cited. This cryptic suggestion is unfolded into an in-depth confrontation. Both philosophers implement the same speculative gesture. Rosenzweig writes in post-Hegelian times; Levinas's thinking is enriched by phenomenology and marked by the Holocaust. Their critical exploration of the relationship to the infinite offers radically new perspectives on the language, the time and the other. The confrontation raises serious questions. How is a concept of alterity possible without accepting an identity? What are the concealed presuppositions? The questions lead to a critical analysis that cautiously explores the boundaries of dialogical thinking. But it is also the expression of the esteem held for the strong power of inspiration. As such, this book is both a critique and a tribute to Rosenzweig and Levinas. The book contains an exhaustive bibliography of the comparative studies. The manuscript was gold awarded by the Teylers Fellowship of Haarlem (the Netherlands).

Brings together some of the most important short texts of Emmanuel Levinas, a major voice in 20th-century philosophical thought. These writings originally appeared separately as lectures and journal articles over a period of 30 years. Essays introduce or clarify themes found throughout Levinas' thought, particularly his two most sweeping philosophical works, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Includes an introduction to his philosophy by the translator. First published in 1987. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Although Emmanuel Levinas is widely respected as one of the classic thinkers of our century, the debate about his place within Continental philosophy continues. In Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak shows Levinas's thought to be a persistent attempt to point beyond the borders of an economy where orderly interests and ways of reasoning make us feel at home--beyond the world of needs, beyond the self, beyond politics and administration, beyond logic and ontology, even beyond freedom and autonomy. Peperzak's examination begins with a general overview of Levinas's life and thought, and shows how issues of ethics, politics, and religion are intertwined in Levinas's philosophy. Peperzak also discusses the development of Levinas's relations with Husserl and Heidegger, demonstrating thematically the evolution of both Levinas's anti-Heideggerian view of technology and his critical attitude toward nature.