Discovering Levinas

Michael L. Morgan0521872596, 9780521872591

Emmanuel Levinas is well known to students of twentieth-century continental philosophy, especially French philosophy. But he is largely unknown within the circles of Anglo- American philosophy. In Discovering Levinas, Michael L. Morgan shows how this thinker faces in novel and provocative ways central philosophical problems of twentieth-century philosophy and religious thought. He tackles this task by placing Levinas in conversation with philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Onora O’Neill, Charles Taylor, and Cora Diamond. He also seeks to understand Levinas within philosophical, religious, and political developments in the history of twentieth-century intellectual culture. Morgan demystifies Levinas by examining his unfamiliar and surprising vocabulary, interpreting texts with an eye to clarity, and arguing that Levinas can be understood as a philosopher of the everyday. Morgan also shows that Levinas’s ethics is not morally and politically irrelevant nor is it excessively narrow and demanding in unacceptable ways. Neither glib dismissal nor fawning acceptance, this book provides a sympathetic reading that can form a foundation for a responsible critique.

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Table of contents :
Cover……Page 1
Half-title……Page 3
Title……Page 5
Copyright……Page 6
Dedication……Page 7
Contents……Page 9
Preface……Page 13
Acknowledgments……Page 21
Levinas on grossman’s life and fate……Page 25
Auschwitz and levinas’s thought……Page 37
Political reflections……Page 44
Zionism, politics, and messianism……Page 52
Responsibility and forgiveness……Page 56
A preliminary sketch……Page 63
Interpreting levinas’s approach……Page 68
Transcendental philosophy……Page 74
An objection……Page 80
3
The Ethical Content of the
Face-to-Face……Page 85
The social, the face, and the ethical……Page 86
The call of the face……Page 92
The face-to-face and acknowledgment……Page 95
Later thoughts on ethics and the face……Page 104
Philosophy and the everyday……Page 109
Totality and the infinite……Page 112
Ethics beyond totality……Page 118
Levinas and rosenzweig……Page 124
Totality, infinity, and beyond……Page 128
Meaning, relativism, and the ethical……Page 139
Meaning and language……Page 148
Ethics and communication: the saying and the said……Page 162
6 Subjectivity and the Self……Page 167
Modernity and the self……Page 168
The early stage……Page 173
Responsibility and passivity……Page 179
The self and contemporary philosophy……Page 184
Levinas and davidson……Page 187
Levinas and mcdowell……Page 191
Levinas and taylor……Page 193
7 God and Philosophy……Page 198
God and the philosophical tradition……Page 199
Early works……Page 201
Later stage: the trace and illeity……Page 207
Philosophy, god, and theology……Page 222
God, ethics, and contemporary philosophy……Page 227
Thinking about Time……Page 232
Early Reflections on Time……Page 234
Rosenzweig and Levinas on Eschatology……Page 237
Diachrony and Responsibility……Page 243
Ethics and the everyday……Page 252
O’neill’s ethics and practical reason……Page 260
Levinas and o’neill……Page 266
Mcdowell’s naturalism of second nature……Page 271
Korsgaard and the perception of reasons……Page 278
Levinas’s universalism and pluralism……Page 283
Taylor’s ethical pluralism……Page 287
What kind of moral thinker is levinas?……Page 292
Cavell’s emersonian perfectionism……Page 297
Is levinas a moral perfectionist?……Page 301
Levinas on ethics and politics……Page 307
Levinas’s single-mindedness……Page 313
10 Beyond Language and Expressibility……Page 324
Levinas’s language……Page 325
Levinas and skepticism: time and absolute diachrony……Page 329
Skepticism in otherwise than being……Page 334
Two interpretations of levinas and skepticism……Page 337
Derrida’s challenge……Page 344
Contemporary philosophy and the limits of thought and language……Page 347
Frege, wittgenstein, and nonsense……Page 352
Ethics and the limits of language……Page 356
11 Judaism, Ethics, and Religion……Page 360
Athens and jerusalem……Page 362
An austere humanism……Page 364
Ethics and prayer……Page 371
The holocaust and the end of theodicy……Page 377
Responding to suffering……Page 390
Revelation in judaism……Page 394
Ritual and the law……Page 400
Ethics and education……Page 403
Reading jewish texts……Page 408
Translating the bible and the talmud……Page 411
Interpreting levinas on interpretation……Page 414
Eschatology, ethics, and politics……Page 419
Levinas’s zionism……Page 425
Ethical messianism……Page 436
Conclusion: Levinas and the Primacy of the Ethical……Page 439
The face as a reason to act……Page 445
Nagel on agent-neutral reasons……Page 448
Korsgaard’s critique of nagel……Page 458
Darwall and intersubjective value……Page 470
Placing levinas……Page 472
Levinas and contemporary ethics……Page 475
Some concrete cases……Page 480
Conclusion……Page 488
Bibliography……Page 491
Index……Page 501