scholarly journals Levinas and Løgstrup on the Phenomenology (and Metaphysics?) of Moral Agency

The Monist ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-62
Author(s):  
Irene McMullin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Natural Conditions ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Moral Force ◽  
The Face ◽  
Ethical Demand

Abstract For both Levinas and Løgstrup, the moral encounter is characterized by an asymmetrical prioritization of the other over the self. Some take Løgstrup’s account to be an improvement on Levinas’s, however, insofar as it appears to both foreswear the hyperbole of the latter’s view and ground the ethical claim in the natural conditions of human life (thereby avoiding Levinas’s alleged nominalism). This paper argues, in contrast, that Løgstrup’s own account is equally hyperbolic in its characterization of the self as fundamentally evil, and that his attempt to ground the ethical demand in structures of ‘life’ raises serious difficulties. I will argue that Levinas’s stronger commitment to phenomenology both rules out the problematic metaphysical claims on which Løgstrup’s ontological ethics depends and helps explain the methodological function of Levinas’s own hyperbole. Unlike Løgstrup, Levinas insists that the challenge is not eradicating the claims of the self, but rather resisting its pretention to a global normative priority. In making this case I refute the argument that Levinas, unlike Løgstrup, is committed to a ‘command’ view of morality—whereby it is the other person’s authoritative status that underwrites the moral force of the claim, not the content of the claim itself. But on Levinas’s view, ‘demand’ and ‘command’ accounts merge in his understanding of the face-to-face encounter because responding to the content of the demand—that I treat the other’s claim as reason-giving—just is to see the other person as an authority capable of making legitimate claims on me.

scholarly journals The face-to-face encounter in indigenous health care: a perspective in Lévinas

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (suppl 6) ◽  
pp. 2848-2853
Author(s):  
Diomedia Zacarias Teixeira ◽  
Nelson dos Santos Nunes ◽  
Rose Mary Costa Rosa Andrade Silva ◽  
Eliane Ramos Pereira ◽  
Vilza Handan
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Health ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
The Face ◽  
Care Practices ◽  
Reflective Study ◽  
Outpatient Settings

ABSTRACT Objective: To reflect on the sensitive behaviors of indigenous healthcare professionals based on the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, to ratify completeness, equity, and humanity. Method: reflective study. Reflection: Studies have identified inadequacies in meeting the indigenous singularities. In the hospital and outpatient settings, they are diluted in the search for care. The difficulty of the professionals to admit them generates conflicts and non-adherence of indigenous individuals to treatments that disregard their care practices. In Lévinas, consciousness requires, "a priori," sensitivity to access the Infinity on the Face of the Other, which in the face-to-face encounters is presented to the Self as radical Alterity, proposing an Ethical relationship through transcendence. The freedom of the Self as to the Other is finite, as the Self cannot possess the Other, and infinite for its responsibility for the Other. Final considerations: The Self builds essence and existence in responsibility. In the Ethics of Alterity, in Lévinas, reflections are proposed that influence sensitive behaviors.

scholarly journals Ali Smith’s There But For The: Identity, Hospitality and Transcendence in the Age of Surveillance

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Andrei-Bogdan Popa
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Right To Privacy ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Stranger ◽  
Subjective Identity

Abstract The aim of this essay is to prove that, throughout Ali Smith’s There But For The (2011), the “narrative” subjective identity (Alphen 83) accessed via the face-to-face relation (Levinas and Hand 42), as well as through storytelling itself, is liable to be turned into archivable information under the pressures of a surveillance state in which its citizens are complicit. I will use this archival/narrative identity dyad as articulated by theorist Ernst van Alphen in order to investigate at length the novel’s staging of hospitality as corrupted by surveillance. I will oppose the notion of identity as information against Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of the face-to-face relation (Levinas and Hand 42), whereby true hospitality depends upon the mutual respect one person has for the absolute singularity of the other, which involves personal information and the right to privacy. As it will become apparent, these identities lose or gain agency according to the engagement of the self with a newly arrived foreign alterity. Thus, the arrival of strangers throughout Smith’s novel thematizes the scenario of hospitality in tension with the stranger as surveyor or as surveyed. The doubling of language, the self-editing of one’s discourse and the risky openness towards the Other are modes of resistance that eschew the artificial categorizations upon which the archival identity is contingent. However, the bridge from interiority to exteriority is mediation. Smith therefore develops a conception of secularized Grace that works by exploring the revolutionary potential of this very mediation and can disrupt the logic of tyrannical surveillance. Part of this approach to history and language is informed by the witnessing of the traces left on the bodies of martyrized dissidents by unjust systems at their apex. There But For The is narrated by four characters in the mediatic aftermath of a bourgeois dinner party in an affluent suburb of London that witnessed the sudden and unexplainable reclusion of Miles Garth into the spare room of his stunned hosts. The event, as well as those leading up to and following it, is recounted by a grieving nature photographer in his sixties named Mark; May, a rebellious old woman suffering from dementia; an unemployed, middle-aged Anna; and Brooke, a ten-year old girl and voracious reader. The essay will approach these characters’ meditations upon the nature of identity as split between its narrative and archival forms.

Face to Face, Hand to Hand: Relations of Exchange in Hamlet

2019 ◽  
pp. 109-131
Author(s):  
Emily Shortslef
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Relation ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Mutual Awareness ◽  
The Face ◽  
Sense And Respond ◽  
The Way

In this essay, Emily Shortslef reads three linked encounters between Hamlet and Laertes in Act 5 of Hamlet—their fight at Ophelia’s grave, Hamlet’s recollection of this event in his subsequent expression of remorse, and their fatal duel before Claudius—in relationship to Levinas’s conceptualization of the face-to-face encounter as the ethical relation. She shows how Levinas’s notion of the self as constituted through the encounter with irreducible and unknowable alterity makes these scenes visible as moments in which the self is called into question by the other. At the same time, in contrast to Levinas’s famously asymmetrical concept of relationality and responsibility, the relationality that emerges in these scenes—one generated by the risk inherent in fighting on stage—necessitates mutual awareness of the other’s presence, careful attunement to movement, and reciprocal gestures of provocation and response. Each character discloses himself through the way that their facing bodies sense and respond to the other’s motion. In these antagonistic but collaborative encounters between Hamlet and Laertes, Shakespeare stages a relation of exchange that at the end of the play will also enable an exchange of forgiveness.

Levinas, Emmanuel (1906–95)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Bernasconi
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Phenomenological Philosophy ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Face

In the 1930s Levinas helped to introduce the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger to the French. Subsequently his work attained classic status in its own right for his attempt to explore the meaning of ethics from a phenomenological starting-point. In Totalité et infini (1961) (Totality and Infinity, 1969) Levinas locates the basis of ethics in the face-to-face relation where the Other puts me in question. My obligations to the Other are not contracted by me. They not only precede any debts I incur, but also go beyond anything I could possibly satisfy. In later works, most notably Autrement qu’être (1974) (Otherwise than Being, 1981) Levinas explores further the preconditions of this account, most especially by investigating the I that was said to be put in question in the encounter with the Other. In analyses that stretch phenomenology to its limits and beyond, Levinas finds alterity within the self.

Levinas on God and the Trace of the Other

2018 ◽  
pp. 320-342
Author(s):  
Michael L. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
Interpersonal Experience ◽  
Divine Transcendence ◽  
The Face ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Levinas takes the face-to-face relationship between each subject and every other particular person to be a relationship of the self with transcendence. He believes this dimension of our interpersonal experience is represented in traditional religious and theological texts by the relationship with the divine or God. This paper explores how Levinas’s appropriation of the Cartesian expression “the idea of infinity” introduces this divine character of the face-to-face and how Levinas goes on to develop and enrich this association of the face-to-face, its ethical character, and divine transcendence. Levinas takes the divinity of the face-to-face to refer to the universality, objectivity, normative force, and motivational attraction of the sense of responsibility he believes is foundational for human experience. In short, for Levinas, the divinity associated with morality in traditional religious texts refers to the normative weight and psychological appeal of ethics itself.

scholarly journals The Possibility/Impossibility of Ethical Community during the COVID-19 Pandemic: a Philosophical Reflection

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-243
Author(s):  
Shining Star Lyngdoh
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Ability To Act ◽  
The Face ◽  
Meaningful Engagement ◽  
Global Concern ◽  
Ethical Demand

AbstractThe outbreak of COVID-19 has raised a global concern and calls for an urgent response. During this perpetual time of epidemic crisis, philosophy has to stand on trial and provide a responsible justification for how it is still relevant and can be of used during this global crisis. In such a time of crisis like that of COVID-19, this paper offers a philosophical reflection from within the possibility/impossibility of community thinking in India, and the demand for an ethical responsivity and response-ability to act ethically towards the Other (autrui) to show that philosophy always already emerges from within the context of crisis. As an alternative outlook to the thinking of totalitarian singularity and individualism, community—in its possible and impossible making—can offer more meaningful engagement with the other human being by being responsible and extending care towards the Other. The thinking of a shared community life is the facticity of one’s own being-together-in-common without the dismissal of individual differences as can be seen in the works of Jean-Luc Nancy, and there is an ethical demand that comes from the face-to-face ethical relationship with the Other as argued by Emmanuel Levinas.

The Hierophanic Facets of the Seraphic Hymns

Trictrac ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petru Adrian Danciu
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Material World ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The People ◽  
Musical History ◽  
The Face ◽  
The One

Starting from the cry of the seraphim in Isaiahʹ s prophecy, this article aims to follow the rhythm of the sacred harmony, transcending the symbols of the angelic world and of the divine names, to get to the face to face meeting between man and God, just as the seraphim, reflecting their existence, stand face to face. The finality of the sacred harmony is that, during the search for God inside the human being, He reveals Himself, which is the reason for the affirmation of “I Am that I Am.” Through its hypnotic cyclicality, the profane temporality has its own musicality. Its purpose is to incubate the unsuspected potencies of the beings “caught” in the material world. Due to the fact that it belongs to the aeonic time, the divine music will exceed in harmony the mechanical musicality of profane time, dilating and temporarily cancelling it. Isaiah is witness to such revelation offering access to the heavenly concert. He is witness to divine harmonies produced by two divine singers, whose musical history is presented in our article. The seraphim accompanied the chosen people after their exodus from Egypt. The cultic use of the trumpet is related to the characteristics and behaviour of the seraphim. The seraphic music does not belong to the Creator, but its lyrics speak about the presence of the Creator in two realities, a spiritual and a material one. Only the transcendence of the divine names that are sung/cried affirms a unique reality: God. The chant-cry is a divine invocation with a double aim. On the one hand, the angels and the people affirm God’s presence and call His name and, on the other, the Creator affirms His presence through the angels or in man, the one who is His image and His likeness. The divine music does not only create, it is also a means of communion, implementing the relation of man to God and, thus, God’s connection with man. It is a relation in which both filiation and paternity disappear inside the harmony of the mutual recognition produced by music, a reality much older than Adam’s language.

Familiar or Unfamiliar Context?

2015 ◽  
pp. 223-250
Author(s):  
Amir Mashhadi ◽  
Saeed Khazaie
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Vocabulary Learning ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mobile Game ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Learning Tasks ◽  
Content Representation ◽  
L2 Learning ◽  
The Face ◽  
Age Range

This chapter endeavored to devise a motivating way to engage learners in L2 English learning tasks presented through the mobile game (m-game). It started on the issue of whether types of a displayed picture on m-games had any significant relationship with learners' performance in the blended mode of L2 learning. To that end, a cellphone-based form of the nonEnglish game of 'Xane Bazi', modified as didactic 'Xane Bazi' for English vocabulary learning, was grafted onto the face-to-face mode of content representation in the blended language learning module. 100 Iranian boys and girls within the age range of 10-13 were divided into two groups to learn English vocabulary items during 12 sessions of an academic semester: One group played a version of 'Xane Bazi' with learner-made paintings and the other group played a version of the game filled with photos. The results hinted at the desired effect of utilizing m-games as applying learner-made painting condition to didactic 'Xane Bazi' was proved to significantly ratchet up the participants' L2 learning.

Levinas and the Responsibility to Provide in Southeast Asia

2019 ◽  
pp. 153-178
Author(s):  
See Seng Tan
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Force ◽  
Communitarian Ethics ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Asian Context ◽  
The Relationship

Firstly, this chapter introducesLevinas’ ‘responsibility for the other’ notion as an alternative to the liberal and communitarian conceptions of responsibility and sovereignty. Both liberal and communitarian ethics are problematic because of theirshared assumption that responsibility is first and foremost to the self. The chapter introduces key features of Levinas’ ethics – the place and role of hospitality, reciprocity and justice in the responsibility for the other. It also examines how friendly critiques by interlocutors(Derrida, Ricoeur, Caputo, etc.) help moderate Levinas’ idealism without necessarily taking things in overly pragmatic or realist directions or, worse, blunting its moral force. Secondly, the chapter assesses the relevance of Levinas’ ethics to the questions of responsible sovereignty and the R2Provide in Southeast Asia. With reference to the regional conduct described in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, it is argued that Levinas’ ideas redefine the terms of the relationship between responsible providers and their recipients in three key ways: one, our assumptions and expectations over one’s extension of hospitality to one’s neighbours; two, the rethinking of mutuality and reciprocity between providers and recipients; and three, the ways in which the considerations for justice play out within the Southeast Asian context are concerned.

scholarly journals Reliability of the modified Rankin Scale applied by telephone

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katia Savio ◽  
Gian Luca Della Pietra ◽  
Elodie Oddone ◽  
Monica Reggiani ◽  
Maurizio A. Leone
Keyword(s):  
Confidence Interval ◽  
Acute Stroke ◽  
Scale Score ◽  
Weighted Kappa ◽  
Hospitalized Patients ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modified Rankin Scale ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Face ◽  
Stroke Disability

We aimed to evaluate the reliability of the modified Rankin Scale applied telephonically compared with face-to-face assessment in clinically stable hospitalized patients with acute stroke. One hundred and thirty-one patients were interviewed twice by 2 certified nurses (unstructured interview). Half of the patients were randomized to be interviewed by telephone followed by the face-to-face assessment, and half in the reverse order. The median value of the modified Rankin Scale score was 4 (first to third interquartile range 3-5) by telephone as well as by face-to-face assessment (P=0.8). The weighted kappa between the two methods was 0.82 (95% confidence interval: 0.77-0.88). Sensitivity of the telephone assessment was lower for scores 2 and 3 (17% and 46%, respectively) than for the other scores (range 67-90%). Telephone assessment of stroke disability with the modified Rankin Scale is reliable in comparison to direct face- to-face assessment.

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