Emmanuel Levinas 1906 – 1995

Emmanuel Levinas was a 20th-century Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher of the phenomenological and ethical tradition, one of the most influential figures of late 20th-century continental philosophy. Trained under Husserl and Heidegger, whose work he was instrumental in introducing to the French-speaking world, he developed in his major works Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974) an ethics of radical responsibility for the Other, prior to and grounding all metaphysics. His central thesis is that the encounter with the face of the Other is the foundational ethical event in human life. He survived the Second World War as a French prisoner of war while most of his Lithuanian family was murdered in the Holocaust. He held the chair of philosophy at the Sorbonne and exerted decisive influence on Derrida, Marion, and contemporary ethics.