Emmanuel Levinas (born 1906): Phenomenological Philosophy

Abstract

There are philosophers whose path of thought can be described without taking account of their path of life. Edmund Husserl is the obvious case to mention. His career would have had to be characterized as typical of the German scholar and university professor unless the events of World War I and of the Nazi takeover had added tragic accents to his life. However, the decisive turns in his philosophical development took place rather independently of these historical events. In the case of Levinas things are completely different. His life is not only “entangled in stories” [using a title by Wilhelm Schapp] as is that of every human life, it is entangled in history itself, into the history of Europe in the twentieth century obsessed by passions and so rich in atrocious catastrophes. And Levinas’s path of thought cannot be understood if one completely disregards this circumstance.