Between Levinas and Heidegger

Between Levinas and Heidegger PDF Author: John E. Drabinski
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438452594
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Although both Levinas and Heidegger drew inspiration from Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method and helped pave the way toward the post-structuralist movement of the late twentieth century, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation of these two thinkers. There are plenty of simple—and accurate—oppositions and juxtapositions: French and German, ethics and ontology, and so on. But there is also a critical intersection between Levinas and Heidegger on some of the most fundamental philosophical questions: What does it mean to be, to think, and to act in late modern life and culture? How do our conceptions of subjectivity, time, and history both reflect the condition of this historical moment and open up possibilities for critique, resistance, and transformation? The contributors to this volume take up these questions by engaging the ideas of Levinas and Heidegger relating to issues of power, violence, secularization, history, language, time, death, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, and the boundary between the human and humanism.

Between Levinas and Heidegger

Between Levinas and Heidegger PDF Author: John E. Drabinski
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438452594
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although both Levinas and Heidegger drew inspiration from Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method and helped pave the way toward the post-structuralist movement of the late twentieth century, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation of these two thinkers. There are plenty of simple—and accurate—oppositions and juxtapositions: French and German, ethics and ontology, and so on. But there is also a critical intersection between Levinas and Heidegger on some of the most fundamental philosophical questions: What does it mean to be, to think, and to act in late modern life and culture? How do our conceptions of subjectivity, time, and history both reflect the condition of this historical moment and open up possibilities for critique, resistance, and transformation? The contributors to this volume take up these questions by engaging the ideas of Levinas and Heidegger relating to issues of power, violence, secularization, history, language, time, death, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, and the boundary between the human and humanism.

Time, Death, and the Feminine

Time, Death, and the Feminine PDF Author: Tina Chanter
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804743112
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Examining Levinas’s critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas’s thought. According to Heidegger, the traditional notion of time, which stretches from Aristotle to Bergson, is incoherent because it rests on an inability to think together two assumptions: that the present is the most real aspect of time, and that the scientific model of time is infinite, continuous, and constituted by a series of more or less identical now-points. For Heidegger, this contradiction, which privileges the present and thinks of time as ongoing, derives from a confusion about Being. He suggests that it is not the present but the future that is the primordial ecstasis of temporality. For Heidegger, death provides an orientation for our authentic temporal understanding. Levinas agrees with Heidegger that mortality is much more significant than previous philosophers of time have acknowledged, but for Levinas, it is not my death, but the death of the other that determines our understanding of time. He is critical of Heidegger’s tendency to collapse the ecstases (past, present, and future) of temporality into one another, and seeks to move away from what he sees as a totalizing view of time. Levinas wants to rehabilitate the unique character of the instant, or present, without sacrificing its internal dynamic to the onward progression of the future, and without neglecting the burdens of the past that history visits upon us. The author suggests that though Levinas’s conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger’s philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is excluded from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinas’s philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics.

Between Levinas and Heidegger

Between Levinas and Heidegger PDF Author: John E. Drabinski
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438452578
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Investigates the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Heidegger in a nonpolemical context, engaging some of philosophy’s most pressing issues. Although both Levinas and Heidegger drew inspiration from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method and helped pave the way toward the post-structuralist movement of the late twentieth century, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation of these two thinkers. There are plenty of simple—and accurate—oppositions and juxtapositions: French and German, ethics and ontology, and so on. But there is also a critical intersection between Levinas and Heidegger on some of the most fundamental philosophical questions: What does it mean to be, to think, and to act in late modern life and culture? How do our conceptions of subjectivity, time, and history both reflect the condition of this historical moment and open up possibilities for critique, resistance, and transformation? The contributors to this volume take up these questions by engaging the ideas of Levinas and Heidegger relating to issues of power, violence, secularization, history, language, time, death, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, and the boundary between the human and humanism.

Philosophy of Finitude

Philosophy of Finitude PDF Author: Rafael Winkler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350059374
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Examining the legacies of Heidegger, along with Derrida, Levinas and Nietzsche, Rafael Winkler argues that it is not the search for truth or even contradictions that stimulates philosophical thought. Instead, it is our exposure to the unthinkable or the impossible – to thought's own limits. An experience of the unthinkable is possible in our encounter with the uniqueness of death, the singularity of being, and of the self and the other. This 'thinking of finitude' also has political implications, as it provides us with a way to talk about, and evaluate, absolute strangeness and, by implication, the absolute stranger or foreigner. Illuminating Heidegger's writings on the question of ontology, ethics and history, Winkler proves that this encounter with thought's limits is one of the mainstays of the philosophies of difference of Heidegger, Levinas, and Nietzsche.

Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness

Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness PDF Author: Daniele Rugo
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780936109
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness explores Nancy's opening of otherness at the heart of existence through the transformative appropriation of Heidegger and Levinas.

Sensibility and Singularity

Sensibility and Singularity PDF Author: John E. Drabinski
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791490874
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Is Emmanuel Levinas a dismissive critic of Husserlian phenomenology, or an important member of its movement? The standard account of Levinas's work assumes his distance from Husserl. In opposition to this account, Sensibility and Singularity contends that Husserl was a vital, living resource for Levinas throughout his philosophical career. The singularity of the Other is the centerpiece of Levinas's thought. The philosophical significance of this singularity, however, cannot be fully appreciated without attending to Levinas's transformation of the Husserlian themes of time, materiality, intentionality, and sense. This book documents those transformations and establishes their centrality to Levinas's notion of ethics. What emerges from this reading is a thorough account of Levinas's constant and productive debate with the Husserlian tradition of phenomenology.

Thinking Difference with Heidegger and Levinas

Thinking Difference with Heidegger and Levinas PDF Author: Rozemund Uljée
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438478828
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Tracing the relationship between truth and justice as articulated by Heidegger and Levinas, Rozemund Uljée presents the relation between the two thinkers as a subtle, profound, and complex rapport, which includes both their proximity and radical difference. This rapport is conceived not as a confrontation, but rather as a transformation, as Levinas's notion of justice does not renounce Heidegger's account of truth and its deployment. Thinking Difference with Heidegger and Levinas shows how the ethical relation transforms the essence and task of philosophy in its entirety, since it shifts the orientation of philosophy and the task of thinking from its concern with truth as ground or foundation to a question of justice. As a result, philosophy is no longer riveted to Being and its truth, but answers to the call for justice and must be conceived of as infinite commencement, where its impossibility to totalize meaning ensures that it remains open to the alterity of transcendence.

Levinas and James

Levinas and James PDF Author: Megan Craig
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253355346
Category : Phenomenology
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Bringing to light new facets in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and William James, Megan Craig explores intersections between French phenomenology and American pragmatism. Craig demonstrates the radical empiricism of Levinas's philosophy and the ethical implications of James's pluralism while illuminating their relevance for two philosophical disciplines that have often held each other at arm's length. Revealing the pragmatic minimalism in Levinas's work and the centrality of imagery in James's prose, she suggests that aesthetic links are crucial to understanding what they share. Craig's suggestive readings change current perceptions and clear a path for a more open, pluralistic, and creative pragmatic phenomenology that takes cues from both philosophers.

Derrida on Time

Derrida on Time PDF Author: Joanna Hodge
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134085095
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This is a comprehensive investigation into the theme of time in the work of Jacques Derrida, showing how temporality is one of the hallmarks of his thought. Joanna Hodge compares and contrasts Derrida's arguments concerning time with those of Kant, Husserl, Augustine, Heidegger, Levinas, Freud, and Blanchot.

Discovering Levinas

Discovering Levinas PDF Author: Michael L. Morgan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139464736
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 47

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Book Description
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.