Levinas in Jerusalem: Phenomenology, Ethics, Politics, Aesthetics

A disciple of Husserl and Heidegger, a contemporary of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Levinas entirely renewed the way of thinking ethics in our times. In contrast to the whole tradition of Western philosophy, he considered ethics neither as an aspiration to individual perfection, nor as the highest branch in the Cartesian tree of knowledge, but as first philosophy. He initiated a new understanding of time, freedom and language.

This book is a collection of papers given at the International Conference Levinas in Jerusalem held at the Hebrew University in May 2002. It gives an overview of the most fecund areas of research in Levinas scholarship and brings together historians of philosophy, phenomenologists, specialists in Jewish thought and Talmud, as well as in politics and aesthetics. Coverage relates to Levinas’s work as a whole and focuses on the many interactions between Levinas’s philosophical writings and his Jewish-Talmudic ones. The authors, world renowned scholars and young promising ones, investigate Levinas’s relationship to Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger, his conception of Justice and the State, and his view of Aesthetics, Eros and the Feminine.