Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Non-Violence

Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Non-Violence PDF Author: Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442694998
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
French philosopher and Talmudic commentator Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) has received considerable attention for his influence on philosophical and religious thought. In this book, Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani provides the first examination of the applicability of Emmanuel Levinas’ work to social and political movements. Investigating his ethics of responsibility and his critique of the Western liberal imagination, Tahmasebi-Birgani advances the moral, political, and philosophical debates on the radical implications of Levinas’ work. Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Non-Violence is the first book to closely consider the affinity between Levinas’ ethical vision and Mohandas Gandhi’s radical yet non-violent political struggle. Situating Levinas’ insights within a transnational, transcontinental, and global framework, Tahmasebi-Birgani highlights Levinas’ continued relevance in an age in which violence is so often resorted to in the name of “justice” and “freedom.”

Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Non-Violence

Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Non-Violence PDF Author: Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442694998
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
French philosopher and Talmudic commentator Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) has received considerable attention for his influence on philosophical and religious thought. In this book, Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani provides the first examination of the applicability of Emmanuel Levinas’ work to social and political movements. Investigating his ethics of responsibility and his critique of the Western liberal imagination, Tahmasebi-Birgani advances the moral, political, and philosophical debates on the radical implications of Levinas’ work. Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Non-Violence is the first book to closely consider the affinity between Levinas’ ethical vision and Mohandas Gandhi’s radical yet non-violent political struggle. Situating Levinas’ insights within a transnational, transcontinental, and global framework, Tahmasebi-Birgani highlights Levinas’ continued relevance in an age in which violence is so often resorted to in the name of “justice” and “freedom.”

Levinas's Ethical Politics

Levinas's Ethical Politics PDF Author: Michael L. Morgan
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253021189
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Emmanuel Levinas conceives of our lives as fundamentally interpersonal and ethical, claiming that our responsibilities to one another should shape all of our actions. While many scholars believe that Levinas failed to develop a robust view of political ethics, Michael L. Morgan argues against understandings of Levinas's thought that find him politically wanting or even antipolitical. Morgan examines Levinas's ethical critique of the political as well as his Jewish writings—including those on Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state—which are controversial reflections of Levinas's political expression. Unlike others who dismiss Levinas as irrelevant or anarchical, Morgan is the first to give extensive treatment to Levinas as a serious social political thinker whose ethics must be understood in terms of its political implications. Morgan reveals Levinas's political commitments to liberalism and democracy as well as his revolutionary conception of human life as deeply interconnected on philosophical, political, and religious grounds.

Levinas between Ethics and Politics

Levinas between Ethics and Politics PDF Author: B.G. Bergo
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401720770
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
The act of thought-thought as an act-would precede the thought thinking or becoming conscious of an act. The notion of act involves a violence essentially: the violence of transitivity, lacking in the transcendence of thought. . . Totality and Infinity The work of Emmanuel Levinas revolves around two preoccupations. First, his philosophical project can be described as the construction of a formal ethics, grounded upon the transcendence of the other human being and a subject's spontaneous responsibility toward that other. Second, Levinas has written extensively on, and as a member of, the cultural and textual life of Judaism. These two concerns are intertwined. Their relation, however, is one of considerable complexity. Levinas' philosophical project stems directly from his situation as a Jewish thinker in the twentieth century and takes its particular form from his study of the Torah and the Talmud. It is, indeed, a hermeneutics of biblical experience. If inspired by Judaism, Levinas' ethics are not eo ipso confessional. What his ethics takes from Judaism, rather, is a particular way of conceiving transcendence and the other human being. It owes to the philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber a logos of the world and of the holy, which acknowledges their incom mensurability without positing one as fallen and the other as supernal.

Levinas's Politics

Levinas's Politics PDF Author: Annabel Herzog
Publisher:
ISBN: 0812251970
Category : Jewish ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
"This book is about the postructural Franco-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. This book covers Jewish ethics in the twentieth century and also cultural philosophy"--

The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas

The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas PDF Author: Diane Perpich
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804759421
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This work offers a new interpretation of what Levinas means when he says that we are infinitely responsible to the other person.

Prophetic Politics

Prophetic Politics PDF Author: Philip J. Harold
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821443151
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In Prophetic Politics, Philip J. Harold offers an original interpretation of the political dimension of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought. Harold argues that Levinas’s mature position in Otherwise Than Being breaks radically with the dialogical inclinations of his earlier Totality and Infinity and that transformation manifests itself most clearly in the peculiar nature of Levinas’s relationship to politics. Levinas’s philosophy is concerned not with the ethical per se, in either its applied or its transcendent forms, but with the source of ethics. Once this source is revealed to be an anarchic interruption of our efforts to think the ethical, Levinas’s political claims cannot be read as straightforward ideological positions or principles for political action. They are instead to be understood “prophetically,” a position that Harold finds comparable to the communitarian critique of liberalism offered by such writers as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. In developing this interpretation, which runs counter to formative influences from the phenomenological tradition, Harold traces Levinas’s debt to phenomenological descriptions of such experiences as empathy and playfulness. Prophetic Politics will highlight the relevance of the phenomenological tradition to contemporary ethical and political thought—a long-standing goal of the series—while also making a significant and original contribution to Levinas scholarship.

Origins of the Other

Origins of the Other PDF Author: Samuel Moyn
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801443947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
In Origins of the Other, Moyn offers new readings of the work of a host of crucial thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth, Karl Lowith, Gabriel Marcel, Franz Rosenzweig, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Wahl, who help explain why Levinas's thought evolved as it did."--Jacket.

The Problem of Political Foundations in Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas

The Problem of Political Foundations in Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas PDF Author: Gavin Rae
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137591684
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In this book, Gavin Rae analyses the foundations of political life by undertaking a critical comparative analysis of the political theologies of Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas. In so doing, Rae contributes to key debates in contemporary political philosophy, specifically those relating to the nature of, and the relationship between, the theological, the political, and the ethical, as well as those questioning the existence of ahistoric metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological foundations. While the theological is often associated with belief in a fixed foundation such as God or the truth of a religion, Rae identifies another sense rooted in epistemology. On this understanding, the ontological limitations of human cognition mean that, ultimately, human truth is based in faith and so can never be certain. The argument developed suggests that Levinas’ conception of the political is grounded in theology in the sense of religion, particularly the revelations of Judaism. For this reason, Levinas claims that the political decision is based on how to implement a prior religiously-inspired norm: justice. Schmitt, in contrast, develops a conception of the political rooted in epistemic faith to claim that the political decision is normless. While sympathetic to Schmitt’s conception of theology and its relationship to the political, Rae concludes by arguing that the emphasis Levinas places on responsibility is crucial to understanding the implications of this. The continuing relevance of Schmitt’s and Levinas’ political theologies is that they teach us that, while the political decision is ultimately normless, we bear an infinite responsibility for the consequences of this normless decision.

Political Responsibility for a Globalised World

Political Responsibility for a Globalised World PDF Author: Ernst Wolff
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839416949
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
The aim of this book is to reflect on the complex practice of responsibility within the context of a globalised world and contemporary means of action. Levinas' exploration of the ethical serves as point of entry and is shown to be seeking inter-cultural political relevance through engagement with the issues of postcoloniality and humanism. Yet, Levinas fails to realise the ethical implications of the inevitable instrumental mediation between ethical meaning and political practice. With recourse to Weber, Apel and Ricoeur, Ernst Wolff proposes a theory of strategic co-responsibility for the uncertain global context of practice.

A Critique of Nonviolence

A Critique of Nonviolence PDF Author: Jeremy Sorgen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description