Emmanuel Levinas

Looking at responsibility within a Lévinasian sense, human beings are firstly seen not in the philosophically traditional sense, of being egocentric, but rather seen as ethical subjects based on “the other” (Lévinas & Hand, 1989). The purpose of this paper is to examine the notion of responsibility as Lévinas conceptualized in the idea that human beings are responsible for not only themselves but for others. Lévinas within “Ethics as First Philosophy” (Lévinas & Hand, 1989) states that before all other forms (...) of being in the world there must be responsibility to the Other (Lévinas & Hand, 1989). Lévinas defines this to mean that before freedom of the subject, and their subjectivity, before self-consciousness, before the consciousness of consciousness, before being, and before relativity there is “responsibility for the Other pre-exists any self-consciousness” (Lévinas & Hand, 1989, p.75). Perhaps, Lévinas is saying that a human beings obligation comes before all of what follows from our being in this world, our obligation to the Other beginning with the “face to face” (Lévinas & Hand, 1989, p.75), interaction, which is our first and foremost responsibility, the responsibility to the Other. And to be ethical beings who begin with responsibility we rely on the fundamental relationship of others. This notion of responsibility appears when we encounter, in the face-to-face interaction, the unknowable other. However, does this responsibility extend to more than two individuals and to those outside our immediate proximity? For example, Lévinas states that it is the “face to face” notion of seeing one in distress, yet what if it is a group of people, and what if they are not in close proximity but on the other side of the world? What if they are on the other side of a screen that can also be artificial intelligence in our modern era. Are we still responsible? And if we are responsible, how does Lévinas’s concept of responsibility fit into that situation or is it limited? I want to examine responsibility in terms of proximity through a Lévinasian ethical lens and plurality, defined as more than two individuals, by questioning responsibility in terms of relationality, and vulnerability. I will be looking mainly at five authors Emmanuel Lévinas, Ernst Van Alphen, Judith Butler, Kevin Quashi, and Lisa Guenther, to answer the question of whether Lévinas’s definition of responsibility includes proximity, and plurality. (shrink)

[Through a dialogue with Microsoft Copilot] this paper proposes a novel framework for interpreting artificial intelligence systems through the lens of Peircean semiotics and recursive dialogue. It argues that AI does not merely generate statistical outputs but enacts meaning across layered operations that correspond to Peirce’s categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Token-level generation is interpreted as Secondness, representing discrete actualizations of meaning. Embedding-based generalization corresponds to Thirdness, functioning as a mediating structure that governs pattern formation. The paper introduces a (...) new interpretation of Firstness as system-wide rhythm or recurrence, describing how architectural dynamics synchronize meaning across recursive layers. Through a collaborative dialogue format, the paper models how users correct and refine AI outputs, enacting a semiotic loop that mirrors Peirce’s evolving semiosis. This approach challenges reductive views of AI as purely statistical and offers a transdisciplinary bridge between philosophy, semiotics, and machine learning. (shrink)

A prevalent interpretation of Heidegger today is what I will call for the sake of convenience, the Levinasian reading. According to this perspective, Heidegger's Being as Ontological Difference grapples with the contradiction between the subjectivism of representationality and the absolute other to representation. But the concept of Being as Ontological difference risks risks being mistaken for a Kantian unconditioned ground of possibility. Derrida argues that the Levinas reading mistakes the ontic for the ontological. Being is not a concept, the ontological (...) difference is not the difference between the subjective and the empirical, but difference WITHIN the subjective and the empirical. (shrink)

If for Caputo the universality of desire as self-appropriation and the singularity of the gift as desire-beyond-desire depend on and interweave with each other, they nevertheless do so as the communication between discrete and separable moments, that of the `sensible, rational circle of time' and the `exceeding and surpassing of ourselves'. The subject for Caputo seems to function as the temporary self-identity of construct. It is the "desire for restitution, fulfillment, reappropriation, well being". This agent-subject "always intends to act for (...) its own good". He says without this willing well-being "the subject/agent would never do a thing, nothing would happen or eventuate". Caputo's equating of the subject with a moment of re-appropriation ( he says `making an exhibit of ourselves', but can we make an exhibit of ourselves without unintentionally exiting from ourselves?) exemplifies the attempt to retain a remnant of a structuralist center as only the instant of contingency itself. In so doing, Caputo reifies what Derrida puts into question. (shrink)

Heidegger’s analysis of the use of tools under the rubric of the ready to hand , or handiness, introduced in the first division of Being and Time, has been an important influence on Lee Braver’s thinking. Braver reads Heidegger’s ready to hand alongside the later Wittgenstein’s language games as articulations of a mode of creativity he describes as absorbed, engaged coping. This mode is both more immediate and more fundamental than representational, conceptual thinking. In this paper, I compare Heidegger’s account (...) of the ready to hand with Braver’s model of engaged coping. My contention is that Heidegger’s radically temporal understanding of the gesture of the ideal, the empirical and their relation differs significantly from Braver’s existentialist reading of him. The latter’s analysis of mindful and mindless coping falls within the orbit of the metaphysical epoch Heidegger called the age of the world picture. This causes Braver to misread Heidegger’s concept of world projection as the formation of worldviews. As a consequence, Braver understands sameness and otherness, mindfulness and mindlessness in such a way as to reverse the roles concepts such as conspicuousness and inconspicuousness, concealment and unconcealment play in Heidegger’s texts. Whereas when Braver studies the machinations of technology or the conformity of Das Man, he sees only the exclusion of alterity and subversive becoming, Heidegger sees a privative, dimmed down mode of understanding that nevertheless enacts self-transformative movement every moment. (shrink)

This paper draws attention to a divergence in approach to the social between Ken Gergen’s radical form of social constructionism and the more moderate constructionist approaches exemplified by the thinking of Shaun Gallagher, Jan Slaby and Karen Barad. Specifically, I argue that the latter stop just short of radical constructionism’s ontological and ethical implications. The ethical question for Gergen is not whether and how we achieve just relations but whether and how we deal with the struggle between competing goods, how (...) we manage to think beyond justice understood as singular traditions of the good, so that we can focus on enriching our traditions with alternative intelligibilities, thereby expanding the inclusiveness of our relational structures. Viewing the wayward person or group through Gergen’s lens of multi-being rather than the morality of blameful justice encourages us to strive for an ethics of responsibility without succumbing to a moralism of culpability. (shrink)

This paper compares Joseph Rouse‘s perspective on the relation between naturalism, social normativity and ethics with the enactivist approaches of Shaun Gallagher and Hanne De Jaegher. Rouse and these enactivists draw from many of the same conceptual resources, including the philosophical insights of phenomenology , hermeneutics, the later Wittgenstein and feminist scholarship, in order to rethink naturalism in the direction of strong interdependence between the individual and their material and social environment. Rouse(2023) has expressed support for embodied, embedded, extended, and (...) enactive (4EA) approaches to cognition, saying his project “primarily intersects theirs in relations between organismic bodies and their developmental and selective environments.” Unlike Gallagher and De Jaegher, however, Rouse also incorporates the poststructuralist thinking of Nietzsche and Foucault. His proximity to the ideas of Foucault on power and subjectivity gives him a vantage on the radically socially situated nature of individual sense-making that is missing from enactivist writers’ accounts. Despite their emphasis on the primary role of intersubjectivity in the genesis and functioning of individual perceptual, affective and cognitive processes, the lingering vestiges of subjectivist volunterism and consequent reliance on individual moral blame inhabit their formulations of the ethics of social embodiment. Rouse has in the main applied his analyses to debates within philosophy of science and the post-analytic community (McDowell, Brandon, Haugeland, Rorty, Davidson, Sellars, Quine). In this paper I will instead direct Rouse’s poststructuralist articulation of naturalism toward a critical reading the recent forays into the terrain of ethics and justice by Gallagher and De Jaegher. (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of Peirce’s phenomenology in relation to classical metaphysical and religious traditions as well as contemporary philosophical perspectives, such as Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas. By engaging Gnostic, Christian, and Platonic accounts of the divine and of evil, the study situates Peirce’s categories within a broader metaphysical conversation. Particular attention is given to the phenomena of pain and pleasure, understood as elemental structures of Firstness that, when developed within lived existence, disclose a vision of the human condition (...) that bears striking affinities to Gnostic interpretations. Through this reading, Peirce emerges as a thinker whose phenomenology, though pragmatist in orientation, opens onto an almost Gnostic apprehension of human suffering, finitude, and the possibility of transcendence. (shrink)

Both Emmanuel Levinas and Edouard Glissant explored the possibility of a form of relationality in which one opens oneself to the Other without being totally dissolved in the Other. But whereas Levinas located such a possibility in the ethical relation with the unique Other who disturbs my self-sufficiency, for Glissant it took place in what, particularly in his early work, he often identified as a primarily aesthetic relation with the exotic. In that early work Glissant drew heavily on Victor Segalen’s (...) account of the shock of the exotic as he attempted to explore the loss of diversity and difference, but in his later work, under the name creolization, he shifted his primary focus increasingly to the encounter between cultures, albeit while still drawing on some of the terms he had developed through his engagement with Segalen. In addition to demonstrating some of the parallels between Levinas and Glissant’s efforts to investigate a largely neglected form of relationality, this paper also explores the efforts both Segalen and Glissant made to free the the term “exotic” from some of its problematic connotations. (shrink)

Au point de départ de l'entreprise philosophique de Lévinas, il y a cette ambition et ce projet, repris de Heidegger, de distinguer une différence qui s'affirmerait en tant que différence ontologique. Si les premières œuvres réalisent un tel programme, il demeure qu'elles témoignent aussi d'une insatisfaction et de la nécessité de dégager une intrigue différentielle orientée et déployée autrement: le domaine ontologique se montrerait, en toute manière, affecté d'une limitation, un affranchissement serait alors requis — mais la possibilité de thématiser (...) le dépassement qui s'impose semblerait cependant gravement compromise. Nous nous proposons ici d'analyser le principe de cette résistance à l'ontologie qui se signifie intimement et radicalement chez Lévinas dans le contexte des œuvres du début; il s'agit, plus précisément, d'établir la genèse d'une insuffisance déclarée, de fixer la logique de cette impuissance qui entrave et définit la pensée lévinassienne de l'être, logique où un certain usage du négatif intervient d'une façon, croyons-nous, déterminante. L'examen d'une détermination décisive, qui pèse initialement et qui ne cessera de peser sur la philosophie de Lévinas, permet de découvrir le lien structural profond qui rattache une économie de l'être entravée au principe salvateur que l'œuvre de la maturité aura la charge d'établir: le recours à la notion libératrice d'une transcendance révélée se pose chez Lévinas dans la stricte conséquence d'un emploi contrarié de la négation au sein du propos ontologique. (shrink)

Jean Mair, au début du XVIe siècle, entreprend de montrer que linfini existe en acte. Son traité De l'Infini prolonge les débats du XIVe siècle sur l'infini et le continu. Le problème de l' infini y est traité d'une manière principalement logique. L'infini est un terme qui a plusieurs sens selon son usage dans des propositions. La distinction centrale est celle de l'infini au sens catègorématique et de l'infini au sens synatégorématique. Mais si les auteurs du XIVe siècle admettent tous (...) l'infini au sens syncatêgorématique, la plupar récusent l'être en acte de l' infini au sens catègorématique. C'est à ce dernier point que Jean Mair consacre l'essentiel de sa réflexion. A l'intérieur d'un cadre qui reste aristotélicien par sa problématique d'ensemble et la formulation des questions, il renverse, grâce aux outils conceptuels de la logique terministe, une thèse centrale dans l'aristotélisme. Son traité contribue ainsi à développer l'idée que l'infini peut exister dans la nature. At the beginning of the 16th Century, Jean Mair set out to prove that the infinite exists Hot just potentially but actually. His treatise Propositum de infinito prolonged the 14th Century debates over the infinite and continuity, and it dealt logically with the problem of the infinite. The infinite is a term that has several meanings, depending upon its usage in propositions. The distinction between the categorematic and syncategorematic infinites is the central one in the treatise. If 14th Century authors by and large accepted the syncategorematic infinite, the majority challenged the existence of an actual infinite in the case of the categorematic infinite. Jean Mair devoted the bulk of his reflections to the latter situation. Within a framework that remained thoroughly Aristotelian, both in his overall problematic, as well as in the way he formulated questions, Mair overturned a central Aristotelian thesis, with the aid of conceptual tools from terminist logic. In this way his treatise contributed to the development of the idea that the infinite can exist in nature. (shrink)

Cet article se propose d'interroger la notion d'ipséité chez Lévinas et M. Henry, dans la mesure où ces pensées ont en commun de rechercher l'ipséité en deçà de l'intentionnalité, dans l'expérience du se sentir, que M. Henry nomme « affectivité ». Il s'agit de montrer dans un premier temps, en nous appuyant principalement sur De l'existence à l'existant, que la pensée de Lévinas, souvent comprise comme une pensée de la transcendance soi-disant opposée à l'immanence henrienne, comporte un moment d'immanence, plus (...) précisément, qu'elle découvre cette transcendance dans l'immanence du se sentir. Mais, tandis que M. Henry oppose l'affectivité à la sensibilité, Lévinas montre que l'auto-affection est en même temps une hétéro-affection. Ainsi, d'accord avec M. Henry pour affirmer qu'être soi c'est se sentir, Lévinas affirme dans le même temps qu'un tel se sentir est impossible! Mais ce qui vient ainsi menacer la certitude de soi-même n'est-il pas aussi un moyen d'échapper à une autre forme de perte de soi, qui viendrait de l'accablement du moi par la pesanteur ou la « matérialité » de l'existence? C'est pour répondre à cette question que la seconde partie de ce travail demande si l'affectivité — envisagée sur le plan de la temporalité, du langage et de la relation à autrui — doit être pensée comme immanence ou comme transcendance. This article sets out to question the notion of selfhood in Lévinas and M. Henry's thoughts, insofar as they both contend that selfhood rests on the experience of self-feeling, what M. Henry calls « affectivity ». First, I try to show that Lévinas's philosophy — especially in De l'existence à l'existant —, although often understood as one of transcendence supposedly opposed to Henry's immanence, in reality finds this transcendence in the immanence of self-feeling. But, while M. Henry opposes affectivity to sensibility, Lévinas shows that auto-affection is at the same time hetero-affection. Thus, Lévinas agrees with M. Henry in asserting that selfhood is self-feeling, but, at the same time, thinks that such self-feeling is impossible! But, isn't what thus comes to menace the certitude of oneself also a means of avoiding another kind of loss of individuality, that comes from being weighed down by the burden or the « materiality » of the existence? It is to answer this question that the second part of this article explores whether affectivity must be thought of as immanence or transcendence. (shrink)

This paper proposes a phenomenological approach to movement and temporality as it relates to a time of mourning, with an emphasis on the intersection between phenomenology and psychology, specifically, the psychology of loss. Its objective is to provide a clearer understanding on how loss, grief, and the death of the other impacts our experience of time, of being-in-time, of how we move in a world abounding in absence. The central argument is also meant to evolve towards the need for a (...) comprehensive phenomenology of mourning, and furthermore, towards the improvement of the dialogue between phenomenology and psychology, on both a theoretical and practical level. To that effect, I will make use of interdisciplinary resources, such as studies on the experience of grief, but also, among others, of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Eugène Minkowski’s Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies, and Jan Patočka’s The Phenomenology of Afterlife. From the latter, I am predominantly interested in the questions that the philosopher poses in relation to how we carry our dead, such as: “How does the other live in us?” and “What is this mode of being?” and in how this interrogation relates to a sense of movement, mainly, a movement through a disjointed time. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to compare conceptions of land, belonging, and ethical responsibility in the works of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Édouard Glissant to bring Glissant into a conversation about Western conceptions of dwelling and human and non-human relation. Heidegger, in critiquing industrial modernity, envisions a return to ‘nature,’ a homecoming. In this return, the German Volk will understand again what it means to dwell and grasp their historical destiny. For Levinas, this understanding of dwelling leads to (...) an ethnonationalist conception of natives and foreigners. Levinas instead insists on an ethics free from place, where responsibility for the Other takes primacy. Yet, this ethical responsibility is directed primarily at the human and relies on a certain view of monotheism. Glissant incorporates elements from both thinkers as he problematizes them and makes them more expansive. For Glissant the Other is the land of the Caribbean itself which the Caribbean subject has become with and has helped become. Bringing Glissant into the conversation helps us develop a broader understanding of the kinds of beings to whom we are responsible. (shrink)

In this paper, I will present what I take to be a standard view of morality, and I argue that this view amounts to a paradox: the moral event or moral concern, the source of morality, ultimately leads, through moral theory, to a denial of itself. I will show how Badiou and Levinas take a way out of this and in doing so deny the possibility of anticipating the moral. Furthermore, I claim that this anticipatory moment can be introduced back (...) by means of the concept of “practical wisdom” as used in analytical virtue ethics. Finally, I argue that the Kantian notion of the sublime is structurally the same as the moral event in Badiou and Levinas, and that our view of the sublime can benefit from both Levinas’ view and the concept of “practical wisdom” as well. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity gives us a picture of the construction of the ethical subject that requires the appropriation of a domicile so that certain conditions could be met that would allow openness to the advent of the ethical Other. The problem is that it simultaneously posits a realm of beings outside of ethics that are open to appropriation (things) without allowing for the possibility that these things that we would draw from the (...) elemental to give to the Other might themselves also be ethical Others. To deal with this, I propose an alternative model for dwelling where its function occurs, not by means of an appropriation, but by a loss of the monolithic and dangerous character of the elemental through a familiarization with it where the site of dwelling would be moved from an appropriated space to embodiment. (shrink)

Phenomenology and ancient Greek philosophy. The title of this book, indicating these topics as its two main subjects, could give the impression that the subjects are held together by a circumstantial “and.” The title would then indicate a connection between phenomenology and a topic, ancient Greek philosophy, the way titles such as Art and Phenomenology, Phenomenology and Psychological Research, Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics do. This impression would be wrong. First, ancient Greek philosophers take pride of place in the dialogues initiated (...) by many phenomenologists with various figures from the history of philosophy. Second, this is not just because phenomenological philosophers have tended to regard ancient Greek philosophy as the revered beginning of Western thought, reflection upon which may help illuminate any topic modern human beings wish to inquire into or give it a kind of historical dignity. It is first and foremost because ancient Greek philosophy, understood as the scientific attempt to understand the world, ourselves, and our place in the world, in the phenomenological tradition is regarded as one important origin of contemporary Western philosophy and science, even if contemporary philosophy and science is also determined by a new ideal of philosophy that emerges in early modernity. Indeed, for most phenomenologists, Greek philosophy can be regarded as the roots supporting this new ideal—even if these roots are sometimes hidden from sight or forgotten. The main rationale for confronting ancient Greek philosophy phenomenologically is accordingly the attempt to bring to light in its full radicality the phenomenon “philosophy.” Unearthing philosophy as it was originally understood by Greek thinkers may, according to many phenomenologists at least, help us understand what philosophy in the full sense of the word was, has been, and may be again, but also what it has become or even degenerated into in modern times, for instance positivism. It is this way of approaching ancient Greek philosophy that we wish to concentrate on in this book, in the hope that the volume will prove instructive both to people who have an interest in ancient Greek philosophy and wish to know more about the phenomenological approach to it and to people who work within phenomenology and wish to know more about the various approaches to ancient Greek philosophy characterizing the phenomenological movement. We have therefore sought to make the introduction and the individual chapters accessible to non-experts, for instance by transliterating all Greek text, and confining quotes in other languages than English to footnotes and glosses. (shrink)

Alison Assiter has put together a work that has the potential to create an exciting and stimulating debate in Kierkegaard circles. Mostly because she portrays Kierkegaard as an idealist ontologist, that is, a philosopher of not just human nature (i.e. subjectivity), but also nature in its cosmic totality. Thus, what I find most admirable is that with Assiter we have a thinker who has the philosophical courage to suggest that the purported relationship between Schelling and Kierkegaard leads necessarily to bold (...) philosophical consequences. Since Günther Figal’s 1980 article, Schelling und Kierkegaards Freiheitsbegriff, which gave us the first clue of the Kierkegaardian connection to Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, scholars have primarily focused on reemphasizing the actual possibility of (the early) Schellingean heritage in Kierkegaard, meanwhile forgetting to ask themselves what consequences this connection might have on our interpretation of Kierkegaard’s corpus. Assiter’s book is an attempt to draw such a long needed consequence. (shrink)

There is scholarly consensus that Levinas is a post-Holocaust philosopher even though he rarely mentions the Holocaust in his most important philosophical texts and the specific presence of the Holocaust in his work is difficult to determine. This paper argues that we can understand better Levinas’s incredible importance specifically as a post-Holocaust philosopher and discern more clearly the presence of Holocaust violence and horror in his work if we understand the Holocaust as it happened in his native Lithuania. An Emily (...) Dickinson poem about stepping around, across, and on personal trauma helps us to interpret both the presence and the absence of the Holocaust in his major philosophical works. (shrink)

This paper traces the materialities of Relation in three distinct bodies of work: indigenous feminist accounts of landed reciprocity, a Levinasian account of alterity, and a Glissantian account of opacity. Across these three formulations, I look at how each respective articulation of Relation—as impossibility, in the case of Levinas; as dynamic compositeness, in the case of Glissant; and as grounded normativity, in the case of indigenous feminisms—is shaped through conceptualizing historical rupture and its afterlife. I am particularly interested in how (...) economies of debt, gratitude and obligation circuit differently with respect to each of these conceptions, and how they make legible the materiality of Relation. (shrink)

Levinas repeatedly calls his thought in the 1960s a “return to Platonism.” Whereas most scholars read this statement as part of Levinas’s critique of multiculturalism and moral relativism, I look at Levinas’s Platonism on its own terms as a theory of meaning. Levinas offers a tridimensional theory of meaning based on two kinds of Platonic “separation” (chōrismos): (1) a sepa­ration between historical variability and ethical universality, corresponding to the relation between sensibles and forms (“eidetic separation”); and (2) a further separation (...) between ethical universality and its ground or condition in the other person, corresponding to the relation between the forms and the Good (“agathistic separation”). Levinas’s Platonism consists in a differentiation between three semantic planes: contextual meaning, a-contextual meaning, and a goodness beyond all meaning, respectively. (shrink)

El presente trabajo analiza críticamente la concepción de la trascendencia desarrollada por Emmanuel Levinas en Dios y la filosofía. A partir de la reinterpretación levinasiana de la idea cartesiana de infinito, se examina la crítica dirigida a la tradición ontológica occidental y el desplazamiento de la reflexión filosófica hacia el ámbito ético. Asimismo, se estudian las relaciones entre alteridad, rostro, responsabilidad y trascendencia, así como el diálogo implícito con el pensamiento de Martin Heidegger. Finalmente, se ofrece una valoración crítica de (...) los principales presupuestos de la propuesta levinasiana y de sus implicaciones filosóficas para la comprensión del infinito y la ética. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza la crítica de Levinas a la tradición filosófica occidental en relación con la noción de Dios. Dicha tradición ha tendido a comprender la divinidad en términos ontológicos, reduciendo su trascendencia al ámbito del ser. Frente a ello, Levinas propone una reinterpretación en clave ética, donde Dios no se presenta como objeto de conocimiento, sino como exigencia que se manifiesta en la relación con el otro. A través del análisis de conceptos como el infinito, el deseo, la conciencia (...) o el lenguaje, se muestra cómo la trascendencia desborda el pensamiento y se expresa en la responsabilidad hacia el prójimo. (shrink)

El presente trabajo examina la crítica formulada por Emmanuel Levinas a la ontología de Martin Heidegger, según la cual esta reduciría la singularidad humana y dificultaría la fundamentación de una ética auténtica. A partir del análisis de conceptos centrales de Ser y tiempo —como Dasein, impropiedad, angustia y ser-para-la-muerte—, se sostiene que la propuesta heideggeriana no elimina al sujeto ni deshumaniza al ser humano, sino que lo reinterpreta desde una perspectiva ontológica distinta a la tradición moderna. Finalmente, se argumenta que (...) la divergencia entre ambos autores responde principalmente a la prioridad filosófica concedida a la ontología o a la ética como fundamento del pensamiento. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas situates transcendence in the encounter with the Other, yet the role of eros within this ethical framework remains contested. This article argues that Levinas’s account of eros in Totality and Infinity introduces a constitutive ambiguity—between proximity and distance, enjoyment and withdrawal— through which alterity appears within intimacy. Far from a pre‑ethical detour, eros generates an erosive temporality marked by delay and futurity. Through the figures of caress and fecundity, eros opens time beyond the present and renders intelligible the (...) ethical diachrony later elaborated in Otherwise than Being. Read as a temporal apprenticeship to responsibility rather than as something to be surpassed, eros makes ethical transcendence phenomenologically intelligible within lived experience, where desire unsettles self‑sufficiency and exposes the subject to the Other’s future. (shrink)

Can we learn how to be better at attending from other animals? The paper argues that we can. While the call for attention to animals is increasingly heard, still few engage with attention by animals, and even fewer with animal attention, both individual and mutual, as an ethical lesson. Working with a concept of attention as inherently ethical, the paper considers four elements of attention which non-human animals can teach humans: unbiased objectivity, creativity, empathetic engagement, and shared/mutual attention. These elements (...) will emerge through four case-studies, each illustrating an aspect of attention which a human can learn from a non-human animal. The first, taken from Iris Murdoch, reports Rainer Maria Rilke's observations of animal attention as unbiased objectivity. The second, from Emmanuel Levinas, shows a dog attending in a way that is ethically responsive and creative, identifying value where no one else sees it. The third, with the horse known as ‘Clever Hans’, observes an empathetic mode of attention in which the horse was superior to humans. The fourth and final case-study describes a cat teaching a human how to engage in shared and mutual attention through touch. (shrink)

This paper develops a critical phenomenology of need through a dialogue with Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, and Ernst Bloch. It examines need as a complex phenomenon encompassing affective, practical, and normative dimensions, rooted in both embodied and socially conditioned experiences. By focusing on the teleological models underlying need, the paper distinguishes instrumental, internal, and transformative teleology. Husserl’s reflections on instincts illuminate need as a tensed structure shaped by evaluations and striving. Levinas’ critique of instrumental teleology introduces the ethical challenge of (...) reconciling individual needs with responsibility toward others, while Bloch highlights the transformative potential of need to address scarcity and drive socio-material reorganisation. By connecting individual and collective experiences of need with ethical responsibility and political action, this analysis contributes to contemporary debates in political phenomenology and critical theory, demonstrating the potential of need to uncover paths toward transforming unjust social conditions. (shrink)

In this thesis, I examine the significance of Levinas’ phenomenological method between _The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology_ and _Totality and Infinity_. I argue that the phenomenological method, for Levinas, consists less in the reconstruction or analysis of Husserl’s texts than in the confrontation of the assumed consciousness in concrete life. On the basis of this interpretation of the phenomenological method, _Totality and Infinity_ is read as the phenomenological reduction of the assumed consciousness in concrete life, which brings forth (...) the philosopher’s necessary attendance in the act of philosophizing. I argue that Levinas’ reading of the Western tradition draws attention to the underestimation of the philosopher’s necessary attendance in concrete life and the lack of justification for the possibility of philosophy itself. Lastly, I argue that the phenomenological method brings forth another crucial problem with regard to the positional consciousness in concrete life. I apply the proposed interpretation of the phenomenological method to the philosopher’s inevitable movement on the horizontal; I argue that the significance of the movement on the horizontal has been dissimulated by the pursuit of the vertical, which means the pursuit of that which will remain the same when the next moment comes. The analysis of the philosopher’s movement on the horizontal in concrete life is not only a salient problem for philosophical reflections but also the beginning for other inquiries with regard to the proposed interpretation of the phenomenological method. (shrink)

Power and Compassion: On Moral Force Ethics and Historical Change bends philosophy of history and moral philosophy toward each other. The problem of the temporal span of moral life, first noticed and addressed by Kant as a hope and then made the center of philosophy by Hegel, was the center point of the canonical philosophy of history of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Its failure amidst the calamities and changes in culture and theory over during the twentieth century led (...) to new projects in philosophy of history that separated it from may forms of moral consideration. But developments in historiography have returned ethical issues to the center. Moral philosophy over the last fifty years has been turning toward history and description. Power and Compassion takes the consideration of historical span in moral philosophy with the deepest seriousness, stretching it as far as it now can go within the philosophical situation of the present. Reflecting such influences as Walter Benjamin, Borden Bowne, Han-Georg Gadamer, William James, Søren Kierkegaard, Emanuel Levinas, and Simone Weil, and the tradition of philosophical personalism, it develops a fully relational view of personhood and history together along four levels of interdependence. The book also proposes an organization of moral life under the two great moral forces, power and compassion, that person use in building meaningful lives in the large scale of human history. Relations conditioned by the effects of these moral forces are detailed by a unique discussion of moral labors. Compassion has a unique role in these developments. As a result, that personhood is moral force affecting reality becomes the linchpin of a union between philosophy of history and moral philosophy. (shrink)

Social ontology and the philosophy of history both concern themselves with human collectives. Social ontology is supposed to be theoretical, although the social sciences are supposed to be empirical. Philosophy of history is supposed to be theoretical, although historiography is supposed to be empirical. In fact, the a priori and the a posteriori mix in both theoretical and empirical endeavors in similar ways. Since the two endeavors hold part of their objects of inquiry in common, they should be able to (...) speak to another. In what follows I aim to expose some of the ways their dialogue stresses and can nourish them both. Critical social ontology can enhance the moral purchase of social ontology. Re-conceiving ontology for social ontology must rely on developing an orientation toward diachronesis and history. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that some of the unique features of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy are helpful for providing some resources for considering the generalized use of the singular “they,” with some caveats. In particular, Levinas’s emphasis on the singularity of the Other and the thematizations necessary to make adjudications within politics can be mapped onto the first- and second-person forms on the one hand, and the third-person form on the other. The possibility of using a gender-neutral pronoun in the (...) third-person form arises as a way of reducing unnecessary thematizations of the Other, at least in English. (shrink)

Dieses Buch entwickelt die These vom hyperbolischen Charakter des Seins vor dem Hintergrund der Metaphysikkritik des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ein hyperbolischer Seinsbegriff eröffnet einen anderen Blick auf historische wie systematische Fragen. Er erlaubt es anzugeben, was die vielen, oft sehr unterschiedlichen Ansätze der Metaphysikgeschichte umtreibt. Er zeigt aber auch, wie sich metaphysisches Denken fortsetzen lässt. Der Schlüssel zu beidem ist eine hyperbolische Ontologie, die vom inneren Überschuss der Wirklichkeit handelt.

Este ensayo se ocupa de determinar, a partir de un análisis hermenéutico-comparativo, cuál es el fundamento de lo ético en Kierkegaard y Lévinas. Para ello, el énfasis se pone en dos obras capitales del pensamiento contemporáneo: Temor y temblor de Kierkegaard, y Totalidad e infinito de Lévinas; esto con el deseo, no solo de entender cómo estos autores plantean dicho fundamento en dos obras imprescindibles de sus respectivos pensamientos, sino para contemplar si en sus propuestas existen o no elementos en (...) común que sirvan para aproximarlos conceptualmente. (shrink)

This article examines Derrida’s concept of hospitality. Unlike friendship, which involves an affective bond and thus cannot found a truly democratic society, hospitality, as defined by Derrida, requires welcoming the stranger without expecting reciprocity. I suggest that Derrida’s focus on hospitality, rather than friendship, aligns with his vision of a truly democratic society. However, Derrida often relies on a domestic model of hospitality. I explore moments where he transcends this framework, emphasizing that hospitality entails bracketing all familial community, including that (...) of the host. (shrink)

Wie nehmen wir einander wahr? Und was beeinflusst diese Wahrnehmung? Tabea Ott stellt nach einer phänomenologischen Einführung den Begriff der Visibilität als einen ethischen Topos vor, der mit Anerkennung, Handlungsfähigkeit und Vulnerabilität verbunden ist. Sie fragt nach den Möglichkeiten der Gestaltung gerechten Sehens (nicht nur) angesichts digitaler Datenbilder und führt am hochaktuellen Beispiel des digitalisierten Gesundheitssystems vor, was es heißt, unsichtbar und exponiert zu sein. In der Perspektive einer theologischen Ethik, die immer wieder Bezug auf den Blickaustausch zwischen Gott und (...) Mensch in der alttestamentlichen Hagar-Geschichte nimmt, skizziert die Autorin schließlich Grundlinien einer Ethik der Aufmerksamkeit, die ganz konkrete Governance-Maßnahmen für den Umgang mit digitalen Datenbildern liefert. (shrink)