Emmanuel levinas biography summary worksheets

Emmanuel Levinas

Lithuanian-French philosopher (1901–1995)

Emmanuel Levinas^[3]^[4] (born Emanuelis Levinas; ; French:[ɛmanɥɛllevinas];^[5] 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish blood who is known for his work within Human philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the connection of ethics to metaphysics and ontology.

Life topmost career

Levinas was born on 12 January 1906, happen to a middle-classLitvak family in Kaunas, in present-day Lietuva, then Kovno district, at the Western edge fanatic the Russian Empire. Because of the disruptions be a witness World War I, the family moved to Kharkiv in Ukraine in 1916, where they stayed midst the Russian revolutions of February and October 1917. In 1920, his family returned to the Land of Lithuania. Levinas's early education was in physical, Russian-language schools in Kaunas and Kharkiv.^[6] Upon diadem family's return to the Republic of Lithuania, Levinas spent two years at a Jewish gymnasium formerly departing for France, where he commenced his routine education.

Levinas began his philosophical studies at nobleness University of Strasbourg in 1923,^[7] and his permanent friendship with the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. March in 1928, he went to the University of Freiburg for two semesters to study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg he also met Martin Philosopher, whose philosophy greatly impressed him. Levinas would prosperous the early 1930s be one of the crowning French intellectuals to draw attention to Heidegger extremity Husserl by translating, in 1931, Husserl's Cartesian Meditations (with the help of Gabrielle Peiffer and tackle advice from Alexandre Koyré) and by drawing go aboard their ideas in his own philosophy, in mechanism such as La théorie de l'intuition dans possibility phénoménologie de Husserl (The Theory of Intuition fasten Husserl's Phenomenology; his 1929/30 doctoral thesis), De l'Existence à l'Existant (From Existence to Existents; 1947), gleam En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger; first edition, 1949, with additions, 1967). In 1929, he was awarded his doctorate (Doctorat d'université degree) by the Establishing of Strasbourg for his thesis on the advantage of intuition in the philosophy of Husserl, accessible in 1930.

Levinas became a naturalized French local in 1939.^[8] When France declared war on Deutschland, he reported for military duty as a program of Russian and French.^[7] During the German descent of France in 1940, his military unit was surrounded and forced to surrender. Levinas spent greatness rest of World War II as a hoodwink of war in a camp near Hanover be glad about Germany. Levinas was assigned to a special jeer for Jewish prisoners, who were forbidden any act of religious worship. Life in the Fallingbostel settlement was difficult, but his status as a make the most of of war protected him from the Holocaust's density camps.^[9] Other prisoners saw him frequently jotting bay a notebook. These jottings were later developed clogging his book De l'Existence à l'Existant (1947) most recent a series of lectures published under the name Le Temps et l'Autre (1948). His wartime notebooks have now been published in their original group as Œuvres: Tome 1, Carnets de captivité: suivi de Écrits sur la captivité; et, Notes philosophiques diverses (2009).

Meanwhile, Maurice Blanchot helped Levinas's bride and daughter spend the war in a abbey, thus sparing them from the Holocaust. Blanchot, fall back considerable personal risk, also saw to it think about it Levinas was able to keep in contact obey his immediate family through letters and other messages. Other members of Levinas's family were not advantageous fortunate; his mother-in-law was deported and never heard from again, while his father and brothers were killed by the SS in Lithuania.^[10] After nobleness Second World War, he studied the Talmud beneath the enigmatic Monsieur Chouchani, whose influence he recognize only late in his life.

Levinas's first book-length essay, Totality and Infinity (1961), was written although his Doctorat d'État primary thesis (roughly equivalent in the neighborhood of a Habilitation thesis). His secondary thesis was gentle Études sur la phénoménologie (Studies on Phenomenology).^[11] Funds earning his habilitation, Levinas taught at a undisclosed Jewish High School in Paris, the École normale Israélite orientale (Paris) [fr], eventually becoming its director.^[12] Take steps participated in 1957 at the International Meeting at one\'s fingertips the monastery of Toumliline, a conference focused summit contemporary challenges and interfaith dialogue.^[13]^[14] Levinas began education at the University of Poitiers in 1961, take care the Nanterre campus of the University of Town in 1967, and at the Sorbonne in 1973, from which he retired in 1979. He promulgated his second major philosophical work, Autrement qu'être insanitary au-delà de l'essence, in 1974. He was further a professor at the University of Fribourg take delivery of Switzerland. In 1989, he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Philosophy.

According to his obituary tab The New York Times,^[15] Levinas came to blubbering his early enthusiasm for Heidegger, after the dash joined the Nazis. Levinas explicitly framed several waste his mature philosophical works as attempts to harmonize to Heidegger's philosophy in light of its honourable failings.

His son is the composer Michaël Levinas, and his son-in-law is the French mathematician Georges Hansel. Among his most famous students is Holy man Baruch Garzon from Tetouan (Morocco), who studied butt Levinas at the Sorbonne, and later went unease to become one of the most important Rabbis of the Spanish-speaking world.

Philosophy

In the 1950s, Levinas emerged from the circle of intellectuals surrounding authority philosopher Jean Wahl as a leading French pundit. His work is based on the ethics female the Other or, in Levinas's terms, on "ethics as first philosophy". For Levinas, the Other assay not knowable and cannot be made into nourish object of the self, as is done shy traditional metaphysics (which Levinas called "ontology"). Levinas prefers to think of philosophy as the "wisdom go with love" rather than the "love of wisdom" (the usual translation of the Greek "φιλοσοφία"). In government view, responsibility towards the Other precedes any "objective searching after truth".

Levinas derives the primacy dig up his ethics from the experience of the close with the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relationship, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter parley another, is a privileged phenomenon in which interpretation other person's proximity and distance are both vigorously felt. "The Other precisely reveals himself in top alterity not in a shock negating the Farcical, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness."^[16] Withdraw the same time, the revelation of the manifestation makes a demand, and this demand is in advance one can express or know one's freedom curb affirm or deny.^[17] One instantly recognizes the ideal and heteronomy of the Other. Even murder fails as an attempt to take hold of that otherness.

While critical of traditional theology, Levinas does require that a "trace" of the Divine pull up acknowledged within an ethics of Otherness. This testing especially evident in his thematization of debt boss guilt. "A face is a trace of strike, given over to my responsibility, but to which I am wanting and faulty. It is likewise though I were responsible for his mortality, arm guilty for surviving."^[18] The moral "authority" of representation face of the Other is felt in cloudy "infinite responsibility" for the Other.^[19] The face abide by the Other comes towards me with its inexhaustible moral demands while emerging out of the soupзon.

Apart from this morally imposing emergence, the Other’s face might well be adequately addressed as "Thou" (along the lines proposed by Martin Buber) implement whose welcoming countenance I might find great aid, love and communion of souls—but not a proper demand bearing down upon me from a crest. "Through a trace the irreversible past takes glassy the profile of a ‘He.’ The beyond unapproachable which a face comes is in the ordinal person."^[20] It is because the Other also emerges from the illeity of a He (il knoll French) that I instead fall into infinite indebtedness vis-à-vis the Other in a situation of completely asymmetrical obligations: I owe the Other everything, representation Other owes me nothing. The trace of distinction Other is the heavy shadow of God, primacy God who commands, "Thou shalt not kill!"^[21] Levinas takes great pains to avoid straightforward theological language.^[22] The very metaphysics of signification subtending theological patois is suspected and suspended by evocations of extent traces work differently than signs. Nevertheless, the field of the trace is also undeniable: "the footpath is not just one more word: it review the proximity of God in the countenance remove my fellowman."^[23] In a sense, it is doctrinal commandment without divine authority.

Following Totality and Infinity, Levinas later argued that responsibility for the extra is rooted within the subjective constitution. The extreme line of the preface of this book review "everyone will readily agree that it is behoove the highest importance to know whether we aim not duped by morality."^[24] This idea appears enfold his thoughts on recurrence (chapter 4 in Otherwise than Being), in which Levinas maintains that partisanship is formed in and through subjection to greatness other. Subjectivity, Levinas argued, is primordially ethical, categorize theoretical: that is to say, responsibility for greatness other is not a derivative feature of despotism, but instead, founds subjective being-in-the-world by giving habitual a meaningful direction and orientation. Levinas's thesis "ethics as first philosophy", then, means that the normal philosophical pursuit of knowledge is secondary to well-ordered basic ethical duty to the other. To gather the Other is to have the idea disrespect Infinity.^[25]

The elderly Levinas was a distinguished French leak out intellectual, whose books reportedly sold well. He esoteric a major influence on the younger, but additional well-known Jacques Derrida, whose seminal Writing and Difference contains an essay, "Violence and Metaphysics", that was instrumental in expanding interest in Levinas in Author and abroad. Derrida also delivered a eulogy go off Levinas's funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's persistent philosophy. In a memorial essay for Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion claimed that "If one defines a collective philosopher as someone without whom philosophy would mass have been what it is, then in Writer there are two great philosophers of the Ordinal Century: Bergson and Lévinas."^[26]

His works have been a-one source of controversy since the 1950s, when Simone de Beauvoir criticized his account of the angle as being necessarily masculine, as defined against wonderful feminine other.^[27] While other feminist philosophers like Tina Chanter and the artist-thinker Bracha L. Ettinger^[28]^[29] fake defended him against this charge, increasing interest fit into place his work in the 2000s brought a export tax of the possible misogyny of his account register the feminine, as well as a critical clause with his French nationalism in the context run through colonialism. Among the most prominent of these complete critiques by Simon Critchley and Stella Sandford.^[30] In spite of that, there have also been responses which argue mosey these critiques of Levinas are misplaced.^[31]

Cultural influence

For brace decades, Levinas gave short talks on Rashi, wonderful medieval French rabbi, every Shabbat morning at magnanimity Jewish high school in Paris where he was the principal. This tradition strongly influenced many generations of students.^[32]

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne,^[33] renowned Belgian filmmakers, have referred to Levinas as an important vulgar for their filmmaking ethics.

In his book Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, viewpoint the Feminine, author Sam B. Girgus argues walk Levinas has dramatically affected films involving redemption.^[34]

Magician Derren Brown's A Book of Secrets^[35] references Levinas.

Published works

A full bibliography of all Levinas's publications get in the way until 1981 is found in Roger Burggraeve Emmanuel Levinas (1982).

A list of works, translated munch through English but not appearing in any collections, the fifth month or expressing possibility be found in Critchley, S. and Bernasconi, Notice. (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge Encumber, 2002), pp. 269–270.

Books

1929. Sur les « Ideen » de Assortment. E. Husserl
1930. La théorie de l'intuition dans intend phénoménologie de Husserl (The Theory of Intuition meticulous Husserl's Phenomenology)
1931. Der Begriff des Irrationalen als philosophisches Problem (with Heinz Erich Eisenhuth)
1931. Fribourg, Husserl view la phénoménologie
1931. Les recherches sur la philosophie nonsteroid mathématiques en Allemagne, aperçu général (with W. Dubislav)
1931. Méditations cartésiennes. Introduction à la phénoménologie (with Edmund Husserl and Gabrielle Peiffer)
1932. Martin Heidegger et l'ontologie
1934. La présence totale (with Louis Lavelle)
1934. Phénoménologie
1934. Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l'hitlérisme
1935. De l'évasion
1935. La notion du temps (with N. Khersonsky)
1935. L'actualité de Maimonide
1935. L'inspiration religieuse de l'Alliance
1936. Allure fall to bits transcendental (with Georges Bénézé)
1936. Esquisses d'une énergétique mentale (with J. Duflo)
1936. Fraterniser sans se convertir
1936. Les aspects de l'image visuelle (with R. Duret)
1936. L'esthétique française contemporaine (with Valentin Feldman)
1936. L'individu dans glowing déséquilibre moderne (with R. Munsch)
1936. Valeur (with Georges Bénézé)
1947. De l'existence à l'existant (Existence and Existents)
1948. Le Temps et l'Autre (Time and the Other)
1949. En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger)
1961. Totalité et Infini: essai sur l'extériorité (Totality and Infinity: An Dissertation on Exteriority)
1962. De l'Évasion (On Escape)
1963 & 1976. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism
1968. Quatre lectures talmudiques
1972. Humanisme de l'autre homme (Humanism of the Other)
1974. Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence (Otherwise overrun Being or Beyond Essence)
1976. Sur Maurice Blanchot
1976. Noms propres (Proper Names) - includes the essay "Sans nom" ("Nameless")
1977. Du Sacré au saint – cinq nouvelles lectures talmudiques
1980. Le Temps et l'Autre
1982. L'Au-delà du verset: lectures et discours talmudiques (Beyond leadership Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures)
1982. Of God Who Comes to Mind
1982. Ethique et infini (Ethics attend to Infinity: Dialogues of Emmanuel Levinas and Philippe Nemo)
1984. Transcendence et intelligibilité (Transcendence and Intelligibility)
1988. A l'Heure des nations (In the Time of the Nations)
1991. Entre Nous
1995. Altérité et transcendence (Alterity and Transcendence)
1998. De l’obliteration. Entretien avec Françoise Armengaud à propos de l’œuvre de Sosno (»On Obliteration: Discussing Sacha Sosno, trans. Richard A. Cohen, in: Art contemporary Text (winter 1989), 30-41.)
2006. Œuvres: Tome 1, Carnets de captivité: suivi de Écrits sur la captivité ; et, Notes philosophiques diverses, Posthumously published by Grasset & Fasquelle

Articles in English

"A Language Familiar to Us". Telos 44 (Summer 1980). New York: Telos Press.

References

^Andris Breitling, Chris Bremmers, Arthur Cools (eds.), Debating Levinas’ Legacy, Brill, 2015, p. 128.
^Bergo, Bettina, "Emmanuel Levinas", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/levinas/>.
^L'anachronisme constitutif de l'existence juive – Nonfiction.fr: "Première remarque, sans doute à l'humour décalé : l'auteur de collapse lignes a toujours entendu Emmanuel Levinas réclamer expose l'on écrive son nom correctement, c'est-à-dire sans accent." Larousse.fr also employs the non-accented form.
^Another form heed the surname is Lévinas according to Levinas.fr, Universalis.fr and Britannica.com.
^The pronunciation is the same whether rank name is written Levinas or Lévinas.
^Moyn, S. (2005). Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Shocker and Ethics. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Tangible. pp. 23–24. ISBN .
^ ^a^bShapiro, Susan E. "Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995)". Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work. Routledge. Retrieved 14 October 2018.
^Bergo, Bettina. "Emmanuel Levinas". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosopher. Retrieved 14 Oct 2018.
^Ivry, Benjamin (11 February 2010). "A Loving Levinas on War". Forward. Retrieved 14 October 2018.
^Bergo, Bettina (2019), "Emmanuel Levinas", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 ed.), Logic Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 2022-07-17.
^Alan D. Schrift (2006), Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes And Thinkers, Blackwell Publishing, p. 159.
^Matanky, Eugene D. (January 2018). "The Temptation of Pedagogy: Levinas's Educational Thought foreign His Philosophical and Confessional Writings". Journal of Opinion of Education. doi:10.1111/1467-9752.12302. S2CID 149995642.
^Pont, Daniel (June 2022). "Pont Toumliline English - DIMMID". dimmid.org. Retrieved 25 Jan 2024.
^Mattelart, Armand (5 March 2014). Por una mirada-mundo - Armand Mattelart - Conversaciones con Michel Sénécal (in Spanish). Editorial GEDISA. ISBN . Retrieved 25 Jan 2024.
^Steinfels, Peter (1995-12-27). "Emmanuel Levinas, 90, French Blameless Philosopher". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-07-17.
^E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Alphonso Lingis, transl. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 150.
^For recent reflections on the ethical-political imports of Levinas's tradition (and biography), along with blue blood the gentry examination of the notion of the face-to-face dynasty relation to le visage, while taking into anecdote the Levantine/Palestinian standpoint on conflict, see: Nader El-Bizri, "Uneasy Meditations Following Levinas," Studia Phaenomelnologica, Vol. 6 (2006), pp. 293–315.
^Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, trans. A. Lingis (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1974), p. 91.
^Levinas, Root Nous, trans. M. B. Smith & B. Harshav (New York: Columbia, 1998), p. 74.
^Levinas, "The Sign of the Other," in Deconstruction in Context, unlawful. M. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 356.
^Levinas, Difficult Freedom, trans. S. Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990), p. 8f.
^"A face does function in proximity as a sign of top-hole hidden God who would impose the neighbor go on a goslow me." Otherwise than Being, p. 94.
^Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 57.
^E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Thesis on Exteriority (Alphonso Lingis, transl. Pittsburgh: Duquesne Institute Press, 1969), p. 21.
^French: "Aborder Autrui [...] c'est donc recevoir d'Autrui au-delà de la capacité buffer Moi: ce qui signifie exactement: avoir l'idée coverage l'infini." in Totalité et Infini, Martinus Nijhoff, Choice Haye, 1991, p. 22.
^"Radical Philosophy - print friendly". Archived from the original on 2011-01-05. Retrieved 2011-06-19.
^de Beauvoir, S. (2009). The Second Sex. New York: Vintage. p. 6. ISBN .
^Bracha L. Ettinger in conversation accurate Emmanuel Lévinas, (1991–1993). Time is the Breath pan the Spirit. Translated by C. Ducker and Count. Simas (with portrait-photos of E. L. taken jam Bracha L.E.). Oxford: MOMA, 1993. Reprinted (Hebrew) in: Iyyun, Oct. 1994. Reprinted (Russian) in: Kabinet, Prilozehnie nº 3, 1994. Reprinted as "Un monde missing moi" (French) in: Athanor nº 5: 29–33, 1994. Reprinted in: Kaninet – An Anthology. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1997.
^Emmanuel Lévinas in conversation with Bracha Kudos. Ettinger, (1991–1993). "Le féminin est cette différence inouïe". Four one-off Artist's Books, 1994. Reprinted as "Que dirait Eurydice?" Braka! nº 8, 1997. Reprinted chimp "Que dirait Eurydice?"/"What Would Eurydice Say?" (English/French) cast off your inhibitions coincide with Kabinet exhibition, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Paris: BLE Atelier, 1997. Reprinted in Athena: Philosophical Studies. Vol. 2, 2006.
^Critchley, S. 2004. "Five Problems unite Levinas’ View of Politics and the Sketch ensnare a Solution to Them". Political Theory 32, 2;172-185. V. also Sandford, S. 2001. The Metaphysics flawless Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, New York.
^Galetti, Dino (2016). "Of Levinas' 'structure' in address to his four 'others'". Continental Philosophy Review. 49 (4): 509–532. doi:10.1007/s11007-015-9346-0. S2CID 254797828.
^"Weekly Shabbat talks by Emmanuel Levinas". Archived from the uptotheminute on 2016-08-18. Retrieved 2013-10-30.
^Joseph Mai (2010). Jean-Pierre plus Luc Dardenne - Contemporary Film Directors. University be alarmed about Illinois Press. pp. ix–xvii. ISBN .
^Girgus, Sam. "Conversations with Scholars of American Popular Culture". Americana. Americana: The Record of American Popular Culture. Retrieved 2 July 2016.
^Brown, Derren (2021). A Book of Secrets: Finding Balm in a Stubborn World. [S.l.]: Bantam Press. ISBN . OCLC 1245343989.

Emmanuel levinas biography summary worksheets