Levinas’s idea of substitution promotes what sounds at first sight like a full-blown notion of relationality. This is reflected, for example, in his adoption of Rimbaud’s phrase “I is an ot...

The present investigation develops the notion of sociality based on Emmanuel Levinas’s thought, and proposes an understanding of sociality that resists becoming a common foundation: an un-common sociality which interrupts the reciprocal shared common, and thereby, paradoxically, makes it possible. By engaging in the larger debate on community, this work gives voice to Levinas on the question of community without a common ground, a topic and a debate where he has previously been underestimated. In this way, the aim is to (...) reveal new directions opened up by Levinas’s philosophy in order to think an un-common sociality. (shrink)

Abstract Epistemic infinitism is certainly not a majority view in contemporary epistemology. While there are some examples of infinitism in the history of philosophy, more work needs to be done mining this history in order to provide a richer understanding of how infinitism might be formulated internal to different philosophical frameworks. Accordingly, we argue that the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas can be read as operating according to an ?impure? model of epistemic infinitism. The infinite obligation inaugurated by the ?face to (...) face encounter? with the Other yields an approach to the ethics of belief that accords with infinitism. This reading of Levinas brings his ethical thought into dialogue with contemporary epistemology as well as provides an historical example of infinitism within the current debates. (shrink)

This sustained and distinctively Buddhist challenge to the ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness resolves the incoherence implicit in the Sartrean conception of nothingness by opening to a Buddhist vision of emptiness. Rooted in the insights of Madhyamika dialectic and an articulated meditative (zen) phenomenology, Nothingness and Emptiness uncovers and examines the assumptions that sustain Sartre's early phenomenological ontology and questions his theoretical elaboration of consciousness as "nothingness." Laycock demonstrates that, in addition to a "relative" nothingness (the for-itself) defined (...) against the positivity and plenitude of the in-itself, Sartre's ontology requires, but also repudiates, a conception of "absolute" nothingness (the Buddhist "emptiness"), and is thus, as it stands, logically unstable, perhaps incoherent. The author is not simply critical; he reveals the junctures at which Sartrean ontology appeals for a Buddhist conception of emptiness and offers the needed supplement. (shrink)