Lévinas, Emmanuel

Lévinas, Emmanuel

(born Dec. 30, 1905 [Jan. 12, 1906, Old Style], Kaunas, Lith.—died Dec. 25, 1995, Paris, France) French philosopher. He studied at the Universities of Strasbourg and Freiburg and received a doctorate in philosophy from the Institut de France in 1928. His philosophical work in the 1930s helped to introduce the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger to France. Lévinas's best-known work, Totality and Infinity (1961), is a highly original phenomenological investigation of ethics and the self that takes as its starting point the face-to-face encounter between the “I” and the “Other.” Extensively developed in Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence (1974) and other writings, this analysis challenged Western philosophical tradition by treating ethics rather than ontology as “first philosophy.” Lévinas was also the author of religious studies, including Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (1963) and Nine Talmudic Readings (1990).