Despite the fact that Levinas has often been accused of having little or no room for the maternal in his writing, his rhetoric nonetheless applies maternal tendencies that complicate his ethical st...

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

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.