Radical Orthodoxy, a growing movement among contemporary Christian theologians, argues that the prominent philosophical paradigms of modern and postmodern thought lack transcendence, are ultimately nihilistic, and are guided by an ontology of violence. Among the thinkers Radical Orthodoxy criticizes are Hegel, Nietzsche, and Hobbes, but surprisingly also the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whom they claim offers an ethics for nihilists. In this essay, I analyze the claims of two prominent thinkers in Radical Orthodoxy, John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, and argue (...) that their account of Levinas is not only unfounded but point out the ways in which Levinas himself is also just as critical of the prevailing ontology of violence that figures in modern accounts of intersubjectivity and politics. Indeed, in his own way, Levinas also offers an ontology of peace, making him an important dialogue partner for Radical Orthodoxy's construction of an alternative ethics and politics. (shrink)

Investigates, by way of Derrida's engagements with Kant, how the foundations of modern constitutionalism can be differently conceived to address some of the challenges of the twenty-first century.

In contemporary discourses on cosmo-political hospitality, contributions of Derrida, and especially of Levinas, have special significance on account of the vision, scale and relevance of their discussions on the theme, in the context of an increasingly globalizing international scene, and the consequent global encounter with diversity. The article strives to read the Indian hospitality tradition and ethos, articulated in several of India's culturally significant texts, and available in some way as a cultural practice even to this day (propped up by (...) a heritage of tolerance and acceptance of difference, which, however, has not necessarily translated into egalitarian social structures), through the lenses of cosmo-political hospitality, found in the writings of Levinas and Derrida, as openness to the other, irrespective of social labels imposed on her/him. Although homely, ritualistic and hierarchical, Indian hospitality was always universalistic in intent. The article argues that an attempt to recapture the core of the Indian ethos of hospitality, should take into account this universalistic intent, revisited as genuine openness to the other person, in the light of contemporary concerns raised by Levinas and Derrida, and fully awake to India's and the world's transformed context. (shrink)

This article investigates difficulties in defining the concept of God by focusing on the question of what it means to understand God as a ‘person.’ This question is explored with respect to the work of Søren Kierkegaard, in dialogue with Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. Thereby, the following three questions regarding divine ‘personhood’ come into view: First, how can God be a partner of dialogue if he at the same time remains unknown and unthinkable, a limit-concept of understanding? (...) Second, if God is love in person and at the same time a spiritual reality ‘between’ human agents, in what ways are his personal and trans-personal traits related to each other? Third, what exactly is revealed through God’s ‘name’? By way of an inconclusive conclusion, divine personhood is discussed in regard to prayer, where the problems of predication that arise in third-personal speech about God are linked with the second-personal encounter with God. (shrink)

This article addresses Emmanuel Levinas's re-conceptualization of Jewish identity by examining his response to a question he himself poses: “In which sense do we need a Jewish science?” First, I attend to Levinas's critique of modern science of Judaism, particularly as it was understood in the critical approaches of the nineteenth-century school of thought, Wissenschaft des Judentums. Next, I detail Levinas's own constructive proposal that would, in his words, “enlarge the science of Judaism.” He retrieved classical textual sources that modern (...) Judaism had neglected, while at the same time he enlarged Judaism's relevance beyond a historical community by turning to phenomenology as a rigorous science. Finally, I conclude with some reflections on the broader implications of this new science of Judaism for Jewish ethics and identity in a post-war period. (shrink)

In the book Forgotten Connections. On Culture and Upbringing, originally from 1983, the late German educator Klaus Mollenhauer interprets Johann Friedrich Herbart’s educational concept of Bildsamkeit, i.e., the ability and willingness to be educated. Furthermore, Mollenhauer conceives Bildsamkeit as growing out of a primitive state towards a cultivated life. The Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, however, conceives the Christian concept of ‘primitiveness’ as a growing in the opposite direction, i.e., as a growing out of a cultivated state towards a primitive one, (...) in which the self shall let itself be invented by ‘God’. Thus, I investigate whether the concept of primitiveness may enrich the reflection on the educational concept of Bildsamkeit, as it is conceived by Mollenhauer. Towards the end of the paper I turn to Emmanuel Levinas, whose ethical reading of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud may reveal a weakness in Kierkegaard’s concept of primitiveness. But rather than rejecting the concept of primitiveness, I suggest that we re-consider the concept, with the help of Levinas’s transcendental perspective of ‘God’. Essentially, I try to address the following question: Can Bildsamkeit be something more than the ability to be educated? Can not Bildsamkeit also be defined as being susceptible to ‘God’, who transcends our existence, after which we are lead towards a teaching and education otherwise? (shrink)

This special issue contains papers first presented at a conference that was held 14–16 May 2008 at the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy at the University of Leicester. Each of the papers takes up ideas from the works of Jacques Derrida and seeks to apply these to questions of business, ethics and business ethics. The papers take up quite different parts of Derrida's works, from his work on the animal, narrative and story, the violence of codification and the limits (...) of responsibility to the aporias of decision. As a whole, the papers offer a dangerous gift to business ethics, of which the stakes are here laid bare – if business ethics is to shrug off its philosophical immaturity and take seriously the work of major European thinkers such as Derrida, then many of its assumed categories, concepts and practices will be shown to shudder and tremble, as it becomes possible to demonstrate how they, one by one, unhinge themselves. (shrink)

This special issue presents the results of a three‐day conference that was held between 27 and 29 October 2005 at the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy at the University of Leicester. The papers in this issue approach the work of Emmanuel Levinas and respond to him in different ways. Some introduce his work, some apply it in various contexts, some propose to extend it, while others question it. The issue also includes, in English for the first time, a translation (...) of ‘Sociality and Money’, a text by Levinas that directly addresses the prospects for ethics in what he calls a ‘civilisation of money’. It is hoped that this text by Levinas will provide those unfamiliar with his writing something of an introduction to his work, and for readers familiar with Levinas it will provide access to a new text that concerns itself here explicitly with money and economic life. The editorial introduction seeks to provide some context for Levinas's work and its reception in philosophy and business ethics before overviewing the papers in the issue. (shrink)

While much has been written about Levinas's conception of ethics, very little has been said about the connection between ethics and holiness in his work. Yet, throughout much of his corpus, Levinas consistently links the two. The first part of my article addresses the important distinction that Levinas establishes between the sacred (le sacré) and holiness (la sainteté). According to Levinas, several influential thinkers conflate these two categories. Holiness, Levinas suggests, represents a kind of antidote to the sacred. The second (...) part examines the various ways that holiness is manifest in ethicality. The key, I suggest, for properly understanding the link between ethical regard and sanctification revolves around an appreciation of Levinas's frequent appeal to the notion of straightforwardness (droiture). For Levinas, the complex relations that bind the self, Other, and God, involve essential conditions of rectitude and uprightness. (shrink)

For Levinas, the moment of real meaning is in the relation sustained with alterity. This relation is difficult or impossible to characterize philosophically, however, because to render it in comprehensive or objective terms would reduce the relation to one of comprehension and make it commensurate with the ego. Thus philosophy has an ambivalent status with respect to transcendence and ethics; but Levinas is convinced of the essentially transcendent or ethical meaning of Judaic practice: Talmudic exegesis, but also Jewish ritual and (...) the keeping of the sabbath; and these elements are included within a conception of Jewish educational practices. Thus to what extent transcendent meaning can be discussed in philosophical terms and evinced in philosophical work —or rather, to what extent transcendent meaning is possible at all—may be clarified by a sketch of Levinas’ broad approach to Jewish practice, particularly in terms of education. This essay shows how Jewish education is essential for transcendence and ethics for Levinas. Reference is made to several untranslated texts that Levinas published for intellectual but nonacademic French-Jewish journals, in which he explains his own pedagogical vocation. This offers an invaluable perspective on his philosophical and Judaic writings; and above all it gives an indication of his vision of the quotidian and life-long educational practices through which ethics and the transcendent relation between human beings are possible. Finally it raises the question of whether a secular or philosophical education could offer this as well. (shrink)

This paper responds to the violence inherent in modern ‘formal’ conceptions of justice which sever the ‘cultural’ from the ‘political’. As a counterpoint to this dominant rendering of justice the paper explores an alternate justice whose character is typified by the disposition and exigencies of the viscera.

Across four decades of writing, Levinas repeatedly referred to the Holocaust as ‘the Passion of Israel at Auschwitz’. This deliberately Christological interpretation of the Holocaust raises questions about the respective roles of Judaism and Christianity in Levinas’ thought and seems at odds with his well-known view that suffering is ‘useless’. Basing my interpretation on the journals Levinas wrote as a prisoner of war and a radio talk he delivered in September 1945, I argue that his philosophical project is best understood (...) as an ontological rendering of Judaism that accounts for the opening or transcendence of sense and intelligibility. Judaism provides Levinas with a salient critique of liberal and idealist philosophies of the subject and an alternative to fundamental ontology. I show how Levinas’ account of the ‘Passion of Israel’ can be read within the exegetical history of Jewish accounts of divine suffering and thereby effects a reversal of the Christian typological gaze. I conclude by suggesting that Levinas’ recourse to Judaism as a philosophical category does not assume a dogmatic origin to philosophy but ‘formally indicates’, in the Heideggerian sense, the phenomenological origins of normativity. In this respect, the ‘Passion of Israel’ involves not only a reversal of the Christian typological gaze but also a deconstruction of Judaism. (shrink)

In both popular and scholarly discussions, sexual consent is gaining traction as the central moral consideration in how people should treat one another in sexual encounters. However, while the concept of consent has been indispensable to oppose many forms of sexual violence, consent-based sexual ethics struggle to account for the phenomenological complexity of sexual intimacy and the social and structural pressures that often surround sexual communication and behavior. Feminist structural critique and social research on the prevalence of violation even within (...) consensual sex suggest that consent is insufficient to ground responsibility; a more fundamental orientation toward the value of sexual agency provides a better foundation for sexual ethics. Using feminist critical theory, phenomenology, and black feminist thought, this dissertation develops a socially situated and relational notion of sexual agency and diagnoses how such agency is neglected in prevailing discussions of consent in moral philosophy and legal theory. I argue that the ethical question of responsibility to another in a sexual encounter—apart from juridical considerations—should be reframed around the value of each person’s socially situated practices of agency. Preceding and extending beyond the obligation to gain valid consent for an action, responsibility demands adapting one’s intentions and behaviors in response to the wider range of another’s communicative expressions of agency. However, communicative expressions can be ambiguous or overdetermined by social context and cultural norms; they often offer only provisional traces of agency. To address this inherent uncertainty in intimacy, I propose drawing on insights from Emmanuel Levinas about the dynamic, open-ended nature of relationality, responsibility, and communication. Responsibility toward another does not depend on securing certainty about their “yes” or “no,” but requires responding continuously under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, adapting behaviors and intentions to make room for another’s agency despite its opacity. (shrink)

Straipsnyje aptariama Algio Mickūno kritika Emmanuelio Levino etinės filosofijos atžvilgiu, klausiant, ar radikalia išorybe paremtas mąstymas gali būti laikomas filosofija. Viena vertus, Mickūnas Levino fenomenologijoje įžvelgia spekuliatyvumo momentą, nuo filosofijos vedantį link teologijos. An­tra, jis tvirtina, kad etinis santykis, esminis Levino mąstyme, galiausiai yra dar vienas ontologinis galios diskursas. Ši Mickūno kritika seka iš jo filosofijos sampratos, kuri atpalaiduojama tiek nuo transcenden­cijos mąstymo, tiek nuo Vakarų metafizikos apskritai. Laikomasi nuomonės, kad Levino filosofijoje trans­cendencija nėra tapati spekuliatyviosios teologijos Dievo sampratai. Teigiama, (...) kad Levino filosofijoje ji nurodo į intersubjektyvų santykį, reikalaujantį fenomenologinės prieigos. Autorė gina požiūrį, kad Levi­no etinė metafizika nėra grindžiama galios santykiu, nėra ji ir Vakarų filosofijos atmetimas. Pripažįstant intersubjektyvumo svarbą, Levino filosofijoje veikiau atskleidžiamas gilesnis, etinis, metafizikos prasmės matmuo, taip drauge pagilinant pačią Vakarų filosofiją. (shrink)

This paper is a critical review of the most relevant studies about the Levinasian concept of passivity. The purpose is to follow the way in which Levinas’s scholars have dealt with the following aspects: the relation between ethical passivity and the possibility of effective ethical agency, the origin of passivity, and the validity of ethical passivity in the public sphere. As a starting point for future research, I finally argue that the best way to read Levinas’s passive ethics is through (...) the dynamism between maximums and minimums present within it. This means that without sacrificing the omni comprehensive view of divine revelation and Jewish tradition, Levinas presents ethics as rationally understandable by everyone and philosophically defensible. Despite being biblically based, Levinas does not appeal to authority in supporting his view, he is confident in arguing rationally. This account could place Levinas in the way of public ethics, which consists in an ethos shared by all members of democratic societies. These minimums of justice could be the way to universalize Levinas’s ethics. (shrink)