Ability, Disability, and the Question of Philosophy

2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-83
Author(s):  
Scott DeShong ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Philosophical Critique ◽  
Central Notion ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Philosophical Nature

This essay treats the field of philosophy and the study of disability such that each may be conceived of in terms of the other, perhaps to the extent that they may be thought of as one. First, it examines the bases and methods of various documents in the study of disability, finding that such study may be conceived of as essentially philosophical, even as the philosophical nature of disability studies threatens such studies’ practice. Then philosophy is depicted as that discourse which necessarily interrogates its bases and methods -that is, as discourse that engages its own ability. The two fields are presented as exemplary of the interrogation of ability, particularly of discursive ability. The essay’s primary influence is Emmanuel Levinas, mainly for the emphasis he places on the nature of language in his approach to philosophical critique. Developing the notion of im/possibility -the simultaneous emergence of a discourse’s conditions of possibility with those of its impossibility -the essay focuses on “dis/ability” as the central notion in the convergence of philosophy and disability studies.

Emmanuel Levinas

Philosophy ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel Malenfant
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Philosophical Critique ◽  
Western Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
Number Of Publications ◽  
Original Interpretation ◽  
Selection Of

Emmanuel Levinas (b. 1906–d. 1995) was a philosopher famous for having developed an original interpretation of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method, using the latter to address the foundations of ethics and normativity. Published in more than twenty-five books spanning over eighty years, his oeuvre can be divided into three categories: (1) his philosophical works, which regroup monographs, essays, and interviews, (2) his Talmudic readings and essays on Judaism, and (3) posthumous notes, remarks, and texts, some of which are still being published. Although references will be made to the second and third categories, the first remains the central focus of this article. Apart from the influence of Husserl, Levinas was also inspired by Martin Heidegger as well as by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. Of Heidegger, he wrote an uncompromising philosophical critique that addressed the secondary role played by ethics in his phenomenology—a critique he then expanded to the Western philosophical tradition as a whole. Ethics, Levinas argued, had to be reinterpreted and understood as “first philosophy” (i.e., as metaphysics), rather than as a derivative extension based on premises coming from ontological, epistemological, or political narratives. Not unlike Plato centuries before, although in a different manner and with very different implications, Levinas contended that the question of the Good has priority over that of Being, since interhuman relationality precedes any discourse or logos about beings—human or otherwise. His “ethics” is thus not that of the tradition: its aim is not to become prescriptive. Without denying the importance of the following properties or faculties for practical decision making, Levinas’s ethics relies neither on virtues, reason, nor utility. The word “ethics,” for Levinas, refers to the fact that “I” cannot refuse responsibility for the other, since that act of disregarding or refusing responsibility is possible only on the basis of my being always already capable of responding to an other who imposes responsibility on me. It is this ability for responding to the other, this command that I cannot efface (even when I ignore it) that allows for other discourses—such as ontology, epistemology, or political philosophy—to make sense at all. The consequences of this original interpretation of the nature and meaning of ethics are deep and manifold. Therefore, this article does not intend to present an all-encompassing portrait of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought. Rather, its aim is to provide the reader with a selection of texts that represent the wide array of philosophical questions addressed by Levinas and his commentators. Given the immense number of publications by Levinas, this entry proposes a commented list of selected major works and articles by the author (instead of referencing complete collections, for instance). The secondary literature is then organized by themes that correspond to areas of research—both well established and new—within Levinas studies.

La ética del Otro: una introducción al pensamiento de Emmanuel Lévinas

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Carlos Alvaréz Teijeiro
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Essential Question ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
First Philosophy

Emmanuel Lévinas, the philosopher of ethics par excellence in the twentieth century, and by own merit one of the most important ethical philosophers in the history of western philosophy, is also the philosopher of the Other. Thereby, it can be said that no thought has deepened like his in the ups and downs of the ethical relationship between subject and otherness. The general objective of this work is to expose in a simple and understandable way some ideas that tend to be quite dark in the philosophical work of the author, since his profuse religious production will not be analyzed here. It is expected to show that his ideas about the being and the Other are relevant to better understand interpersonal relationships in times of 4.0 (re)evolution. As specific objectives, this work aims to expose in chronological order the main works of the thinker, with special emphasis on his ethical implications: Of the evasion (1935), The time and the Other (1947), From the existence to the existent (1947), Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (1961) and, last, Otherwise than being, or beyond essence (1974). In the judgment of Lévinas, history of western philosophy starting with Greece, has shown an unusual concern for the Being, this is, it has basically been an ontology and, accordingly, it has relegated ethics to a second or third plane. On the other hand and in a clear going against the tide movement, our author supports that ethics should be considered the first philosophy and more, even previous to the proper philosophize. This novel approach implies, as it is supposed, that the essential question of the philosophy slows down its origin around the Being in order to inquire about the Other: it is a philosophy in first person. Such a radical change of perspective generates an underlying change in how we conceive interpersonal relationships, the complex framework of meanings around the relationship Me and You, which also philosopher Martin Buber had already spoken of. As Lévinas postulates that ethics is the first philosophy, this involves that the Other claims all our attention, intellectual and emotional, to the point of considering that the relationship with the Other is one of the measures of our identity. Thus, “natural” attitude –husserlian word not used by Lévinas- would be to be in permanent disposition regarding to the meeting with the Other, to be in permanent opening state to let ourselves be questioned by him. Ontology, as the author says, being worried about the Being, has been likewise concerned about the Existence, when the matter is to concern about the particular Existent that every otherness supposes for us. In conclusion it can be affirmed that levinasian ethics of the meeting with the Other, particular Face, irreducible to the assumption, can contribute with an innovative looking to (re)evolving the interpersonal relationships in a 4.0 context.

Emmanuel Levinas: Um estudo sobre a ética da alteridade

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abimael Francisco do Nascimento
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Thought ◽  
Philosophical Criticism ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Theoretical Foundations ◽  
First Philosophy

The general objective of this study is to analyze the postulate of the ethics of otherness as the first philosophy, presented by Emmanuel Levinas. It is a proposal that runs through Levinas' thinking from his theoretical foundations, to his philosophical criticism. Levinas' thought presents itself as a new thought, as a critique of ontology and transcendental philosophy. For him, the concern with knowledge and with being made the other to be forgotten, placing the other in totality. Levinas proposes the ethics of otherness as sensitivity to the other. The subject says here I am, making myself responsible for the other in an infinite way, in a transcendence without return to myself, becoming hostage to the other, as an irrefutable responsibility. The idea of the infinite, present in the face of the other, points to a responsibility whoever more assumes himself, the more one is responsible, until the substitution by other.

scholarly journals God Below: A Faith Born in Hell—Life and Fate and the Otherwise Than Being

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
Karl Shankar SenGupta
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
The Other ◽  
French Army ◽  
Holy Fool ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
Utopian Thought ◽  
Primary Focus

This essay examines the idea of kenosis and holy folly in the years before, during, and after the Holocaust. The primary focus will be Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, though it also will touch upon Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons and the ethics of the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, speaking to their intersecting ideas. Dostoevsky, true enough, predates the Shoah, whereas Grossman was a Soviet Jew who served as a journalist (most famously at the Battle of Stalingrad), and Levinas was a soldier in the French army, captured by the Nazis and placed in a POW camp. Each of these writers wrestles with the problem of evil in various ways, Dostoevsky and Levinas as theists—one Christian, the other Jewish—and Grossman as an atheist; yet, despite their differences, there are ever deeper resonances in that all are drawn to the idea of kenosis and the holy fool, and each writer employs variations of this idea in their respective answers to the problem of evil. Each argues, more or less, that evil arises in totalizing utopian thought which reifies individual humans to abstractions—to The Human, and goodness to The Good. Each looks to kenosis as the “antidote” to this utopian reification.

scholarly journals The Law Challenged and the Critique of Identity with Emmanuel Levinas

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Petrilli
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Object Relation ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Orientation ◽  
New Humanism ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject

AbstractIdentity as traditionally conceived in mainstream Western thought is focused on theory, representation, knowledge, subjectivity and is centrally important in the works of Emmanuel Levinas. His critique of Western culture and corresponding notion of identity at its foundations typically raises the question of the other. Alterity in Levinas indicates existence of something on its own account, in itself independently of the subject’s will or consciousness. The objectivity of alterity tells of the impossible evasion of signs from their destiny, which is the other. The implications involved in reading the signs of the other have contributed to reorienting semiotics in the direction of semioethics. In Levinas, the I-other relation is not reducible to abstract cognitive terms, to intellectual synthesis, to the subject-object relation, but rather tells of involvement among singularities whose distinctive feature is alterity, absolute alterity. Humanism of the other is a pivotal concept in Levinas overturning the sense of Western reason. It asserts human duties over human rights. Humanism of alterity privileges encounter with the other, responsibility for the other, over tendencies of the centripetal and egocentric orders that instead exclude the other. Responsibility allows for neither rest nor peace. The “properly human” is given in the capacity for absolute otherness, unlimited responsibility, dialogical intercorporeity among differences non-indifferent to each other, it tells of the condition of vulnerability before the other, exposition to the other. The State and its laws limit responsibility for the other. Levinas signals an essential contradiction between the primordial ethical orientation and the legal order. Justice involves comparing incomparables, comparison among singularities outside identity. Consequently, justice places limitations on responsibility, on unlimited responsibility which at the same time it presupposes as its very condition of possibility. The present essay is structured around the following themes: (1) Premiss; (2) Justice, uniqueness, and love; (3) Sign and language; (4) Dialogue and alterity; (5) Semiotic materiality; (6) Globalization and the trap of identity; (7) Human rights and rights of the other: for a new humanism; (8) Ethics; (9) The World; (10) Outside the subject; (11) Responsibility and Substitution; (12) The face; (13) Fear of the other; (14) Alterity and justice; (15) Justice and proximity; (16) Literary writing; (17) Unjust justice; (18) Caring for the other.

Excès du témoignage, déhiscence du témoin. Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Louis Chrétien

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 129-151
Author(s):  
Rodolphe Olcèse ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
The Other ◽  
Subjective Truth ◽  
Important Extension ◽  
The Voice

This text articulates the concept of subjective truth developed by Søren Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, in connection to a conception of testimony which both exceeds and reveals the possibilities of thinking and acting of the witness. This imbalance between the testimony and the witness finds an important extension in the distinction between the Saying and the Said made by Emmanuel Lévinas in Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. This distinction opens up an understanding of thought as affectivity and allows witnessing to be viewed in the light of responsibility to the other. By being part of this philosophical heritage, Jean-Louis Chrétien shows how the testimony of the infinite is also phenomenalized in the experience of a chant that discovers its own modalities in this excess of beauty on the voice that tries to say it.

BORDERCROSSINGS: LEVINAS, HEIDEGGER, AND THE ETHICS OF THE OTHER

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-217
Author(s):  
CHARLES BAMBACH
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cornell University

Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005)Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005)

scholarly journals Justiça porvir e o tempo do outro: derrida leitor de Levinas [Justice to come and the time of the other: Derrida reading Levinas]

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Manoel Uchoa ◽  
José Tadeu Batista De Souza
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
To Come

Discorrer sobre a proximidade entre os trabalhos de Jacques Derrida e Emmanuel Lévinas perpassa pela amizade e a interlocução que mantiveram durante toda a vida. Como um referencial caro a Derrida, a ética levinasiana surgiu como uma alternativa a tradição fi losófi ca do Ocidente. Assim, nos caminhos heterogêneos que suas obras traçaram, pode-se marcar uma profunda intercessão: a alteridade é constitutiva no pensamento. Logo, o último moralista de nossa época tem uma contribuição pertinente ao pensador da desconstrução. Pretende-se nesse artigo analisar a relação do pensamento desses fi lósofos em relação à categoria de Justiça a partir da alteridade.

scholarly journals The Stranger as Friend: The Poetics of Friendship in Homer, Dante, and Boccaccio

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franco Masciandaro
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Natural Extension ◽  
Divine Comedy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Philosophical Method ◽  
The Divine Comedy ◽  
The One ◽  
The Stranger

The principal aim of this study is to participate in the current renewed discourse on the meaning of friendship, initiated in 1994 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida with his Politics of Friendship, by combining the philosophical method of inquiry with the hermeneutical approach to poetic representations of friendship in the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and the Decameron. It examines friendship not only as the unique love between two persons based on familiarity and proximity, but as the love for the one who is far away, the stranger, for this is a natural extension of the implicit love of the distant other, of the other-as-stranger – what Emmanuel Levinas has called "the infinity of the Other" – which is concealed in our friend, and which, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, puts us "authentically in relation" with him or her.

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