Inhalt: | I. Early Themes -- Being and Beginning -- Laziness and Fatigue -- Being-in-general: il y a -- Dasein and Hypostasis -- Need, Desire and the World -- II Husserl and the Problem of Ontology -- Phenomenological Method and Ontology -- Naturalistic Ontology and Psychologism -- The Problem of Intentionality -- The Meaning of Essences -- The Phenomenological Reduction -- Intentionality as Movement -- The Break with Husserl -- III. From Self to Same -- The Self as Life -- Human Corporeity and Need -- Life and the Elemental -- Habitation -- Art and the Elemental -- IV. The Foundation of Ethical Metaphysics -- What Separated Being Means -- Totality and Exteriority -- The Face and the Problem of Appearance -- The Break with Ontology -- The Idea of the Infinite -- Metaphysics and Justice -- V. Beyond Temporality -- Violence and Time -- Being-towards-death -- The Phenomenology of Love -- The Phenomenon of Transcendence -- Fecundity -- Temporality and Infinity -- VI. What is Language -- Language and Discourse -- An Alternative View of Language -- The Trace -- Responsibility -- VII. Philosophy and the Covenant -- What Judaism Means -- Historical Method and Traditional Texts -- The Phenomenon of Atonement -- Jewish Messianism: The Break with Totality -- The Temptation of Modernity -- The Meaning of Society -- VIII. Conclusions -- The Objectivity of Values -- Morality and Metaphysics -- Language -- The Idea of the Infinite -- Key to special terminology. Emmanuel Levinas recounts the main events of his life in a brief essay, "Signature," appended to a collection of essays on social, political and religious themes entitled Dillicile Uberti. He was born in I905 in Lithu ania and in I9I7, while living in the Ukraine, experienced the collapse of the old regime in Russia. In I923 he came to the University of Strasbourg where Charles Blondel, Halbwachs, Pradines, Carteron and later Gueroult were teaching. He was deeply influenced by those of his teachers who had been adolescents during the time of the Dreyfus affair and for whom this issue assumed critical importance. Continuing his studies at Freiburg from I928-I929, he served an apprenticeship in phenomenology with Jean Hering. Subsequent encounters with Leon Brunschwicg and regular conversations with Gabriel Marcel served to distinguish, to sharpen and bring into the foreground, his own unique point of view. He also attests a long friendship with Jean Wahl. To gether with Henri Nerson he undertook a study of Talmudic sources under the guidance of a teacher who communicated the traditional Jewish mode of exegesis. It is no accident that Levinas begins his autobiographical account, which is indeed no more than a spare outline of events and formative influences, with the information that the Hebrew Bible directed his thinking from the time of his earliest child hood in Lithuania. |
