Critics of Levinas reject the notion that the abstract face of the other can ground ethics and generate specific responsibilities. To the contrary, I argue that the face does ground a practical and pragmatic ethics. Drawing on Levinas' phenomenological analyses of the enjoying subject, I show that the face communicates an imperative to the subject that obligates her or him to repair the concrete context of action in which the subject encounters the other. My elucidation takes very seriously the notion (...) that the face speaks and the face is a body. When coupled with a pragmatic account of communication, Levinas gives us a robust elucidation of the phenomenological and pragmatic dimensions of ethical responsibility. Key Words: embodiment • ethics • face • Emmanuel Levinas • phenomenology • pragmatics • responsibility. (shrink)

My aim is to prove that Hermann Cohen was not only a philosopher of dialogue but has played an exceedingly important role in the history of that current of thought. His books Ethics of Pure Will (1904) and Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919) offer a detailed analysis of the relationships between I and Thou, I and It, I and We. In the first book these relationships are considered from the ethical-legal point of view and in (...) the second from the viewpoint of religious anthropology. However, Cohen considers the problem of inter-personal relationships not in isolation, but as an important component of his entire philosophical system. Deduction of the concept of personality in Ethics of Pure Will is based on Cohen’s logic of the origin expounded in the first part of his system in The Logic of Pure Cognition. Cohen explains that the origin of the self-consciousness of I as a personality is not the external world, but another person, i.e. Thou. In turn, the partnership relationships between I and Thou create the community We which forms the basis of the law-governed state. The process of artistic creation in the framework of inter-personal relationship is explored in Aesthetics of Pure Feeling. Finally, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism formulates the conception of religion as the most complete realisation of inter-personal relationship. Thus, dialogism became an important dimension of Cohen’s entire philosophical system, a fact noted by Martin Buber. Franz Rosenzweig, in unfolding dialogical thinking, expressly appeals to all the elements of Cohen’s system. There are signs of his influence on Bakhtin’s doctrine. Thus, examining Cohen’s doctrine as part of the philosophy of dialogue gives insights into this entire trend as a coherent whole. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Levinas’s understanding of the social as distinguished from the political. In his neo-phenomenological work, Levinas never conceptualized the difference between the political and the social, because he was more interested in the difference between the ethical and everything else. In his Talmudic Readings, however, with the help of examples or paradigms, he offers a vision of a social domain distinct from the political one. This paper concentrates on the Talmudic Readings to delineate those situations in which (...) Levinas distinguishes such a specifically social realm. It analyzes Levinas’s understanding of the city as paradigm of liberalism’s shortcomings and elaborates on the absence of the social in Levinas’s conception of a good life. (shrink)

This article is part II of a consideration of phenomenology of religion focusing in this part on the conversation in contemporary French phenomenology. It begins with a brief comment about Heidegger's phenomenology of religious life and then engages most heavily those thinkers who discuss the phenomenon of religion in the Francophone context: Jean Héring, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean‐Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Jean‐Yves Lacoste, Jean‐Louis Chrétien, and Emmanuel Falque. The article concludes with a brief consideration of the contemporary Anglophone conversation and the (...) ways in which these French thinkers are appropriated in the current discussion about the phenomenality of religion. (shrink)

Levinas ̓s work is explicitly placed within the heritage of the Phenomenological school. Nevertheless, he repeatedly uses notions drawn from the religious tradition, especially Jewish, up to the point of stating that Judaism is a “category of being”. This paper analyses the role of Judaism as a category, beginning with a reconstruction of this notion in the most influential authors within Levinas’s philosophy. Finally, the role and meaning that this categorial structure take on in Levinas will be shown, through the (...) examination of four main components: the exposition of alterity as separation and glory; the relationship of responsibility as election and substitution; the understanding of temporality as creation and redemption; and the prophetical understanding of language. (shrink)

Habermas explained the attraction of German Idealism to twentieth century Jewish philosophers by appealing to the impact of kabbalah on the German Idealists. Schelling was his principal example. In this article, I trace two lines of Jewish reception of Schelling in the nineteenth century. Among German-Jewish thinkers, Schelling was attractive because of his philosophy of mythology, not because of his relation to kabbalah. Among Galician-Jewish thinkers, Schelling was attractive because of what they took to be his non-mythological version of kabbalah. (...) In both cases, Schelling offered a middle road between, on the one hand, traditionalist rejection of modernity and non-Jewish philosophy and, on the other, varieties of antinomianism. (shrink)

I seek to draw out the unique character of Levinas’ theory of recognition by highlighting its transitional character in a double sense. It is transitional, firstly, in that it stands between two models of recognition: the earlier agonistic model of Kojeve and the later model of Honneth which takes as its point of departure a primordial relation of mutual affirmation between individuals. It is transitional secondly in the sense that, while Levinas initially employs the concept of recognition, he is later (...) explicit in his rejection of it. The interest of Levinas’ transitional model of recognition for the philosophy of religion is that Levinas negotiates both transitions by calling on archetypes borrowed from the Jewish tradition. An exploration of this model thus provides us with a fresh vantage point from which to address anew the question of the articulation of social philosophy and the philosophy of religion in his work. (shrink)

This paper compares the later Levinas’ notion of “substitution” with Kant’s account of substitution in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Kant’s account is modelled on the Christian doctrine of the vicarious substitution of Christ, and some recent commentators on Levinas have argued that Levinas’ account is also similar to this Christian doctrine. By bringing out what I see as major differences between the two accounts, I show that Levinas’ notion of substitution should not be understood in this way.

The project behind this and the following1 special issue of Angelaki first assumed concrete form in the shape of a three-day international conference, “Continental Philosophy and the Sciences,” hel...

This essay reveals the destructive possibility inherent in the deformalization of the Kantian notion of time governing Levinas' engagement with Rosenzweig. It demonstrates that this programme of deformalization not only retains Rosenzweig's idea that the abstract aspects of time can be deformalized, and thus grounded concretely, in the biblical events of temporality, but also moves toward an ethical destruction of the schematism understood as an exposition of the temporality of the Other which can be distinguished essentially as a threefold grounding (...) of time in the Kantian sense. This unique connection between the temporality of the Other and this ethical destruction of the schematism is then developed according to the ontological destruction of the schematism in Heidegger's exposition of the problematic of temporality on the one hand, and to the repetition or renewal of this temporal problematic of the schematism in Levinas' deformalization of the Kantian notion of time on the other. The essay concludes.. (shrink)