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.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) was a Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher whose work refocused continental philosophy on the ethical relation to the other. Born in Kaunas, he studied phenomenology with Husserl and Heidegger at Freiburg in 1928–1929 and became one of the first French philosophers to engage their work seriously. He served in the French army at the start of World War II, was held as a prisoner of war for five years, and lost most of his family in the Holocaust.

Levinas's major works are Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974). The two books develop a phenomenology of the encounter with the other that Levinas argues is more fundamental than the analyses of consciousness and being that organized Husserl and Heidegger. The face of the other addresses the self with an ethical demand that precedes and conditions any ontological analysis; the I is constituted as responsible before any deliberate choice. Levinas's vocabulary — the face, the third, the said and the saying, substitution — has shaped much subsequent continental ethics.

Levinas's philosophical relation to his Jewish religious thought — published in his Talmudic readings and shorter Jewish writings — is unusually close for a continental philosopher. His influence on Derrida, Marion, and a generation of phenomenologists of religion has been decisive. He died in Paris in 1995.