"These 13 essays seek to discover common ground between Levinas's ethical project and various religious and philosophical traditions of Asia such as Mahayana Buddhism, Theravadic Buddhism, Vedism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Islam"--

The thirteen essays collected in this volume investigate the possibility that the word "God" can be understood now, at the end of the twentieth century, in a meaningful way. Nine of the essays appear in English translation for the first time. Among Levinas's writings, this volume distinguishes itself, both for students of his thought and for a wider audience, by the range of issues it addresses. Levinas not only rehearses the ethical themes that have led him to be regarded as one of the most original thinkers working out of the phenomenological tradition, but he also takes up philosophical questions concerning politics, language, and religion. The volume situates his thought in a broader intellectual context than have his previous works. In these essays, alongside the detailed investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, Rosenzweig, and Buber that characterize all his writings, Levinas also addresses the thought of Kierkegaard, Marx, Bloch, and Derrida. Some essays provide lucid expositions not available elsewhere to key areas of Levinas's thought. "God and Philosophy" is perhaps the single most important text for understanding Levinas and is in many respects the best introduction to his works. "From Consciousness to Wakefulness" illuminates Levinas's relation to Husserl and thus to phenomenology, which is always his starting point, even if he never abides by the limits it imposes. In "The Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other," Levinas not only addresses Derrida's Speech and Phenomenon but also develops an answer to the later Heidegger's account of the history of Being by suggesting another way of reading that history. Among the other topics examined in the essays are the Marxist concept of ideology, death, hermeneutics, the concept of evil, the philosophy of dialogue, the relation of language to the Other, and the acts of communication and mutual understanding.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was a leading philosopher and Talmudic commentator. This book is a major collection of essays representing the culmination of Levinas's philosophy. It gathers his important work and reveals the development of his thought. It looks at issues of suffering, love, religion, culture, justice, human rights, and legal theory.

The posthumous publication of Emmanuel Levinas’s wartime diaries, postwar lectures, and drafts for two novels afford new approaches to understanding the relationship between literature, philosophy, and religion. This volume gathers an international list of experts to examine new questions raised by Levinas’s deep and creative experiment in thinking at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and religion. Chapters address the role and significance of poetry, narrative, and metaphor in accessing the ethical sense of ordinary life; Levinas's critical engagement with authors such as Leon Bloy, Paul Celan, Vassily Grossman, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Blanchot; analyses of Levinas’s draft novels Eros ou Triple opulence and La Dame de chez Wepler; and the application of Levinas's thought in reading contemporary authors such as Ian McEwen and Cormac McCarthy. Contributors include Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Kevin Hart, Eric Hoppenot, Vivian Liska, Jean-Luc Nancy and François-David Sebbah, among others.

Presenting a comprehensive portrayal of the reading of Chinese and Buddhist philosophy in early twentieth-century German thought, Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought examines the implications of these readings for contemporary issues in comparative and intercultural philosophy. Through a series of case studies from the late 19th-century and early 20th-century, Eric Nelson focuses on the reception and uses of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism in German philosophy, covering figures as diverse as Buber, Heidegger, and Misch. He argues that the growing intertextuality between traditions cannot be appropriately interpreted through notions of exclusive identities, closed horizons, or unitary traditions. Providing an account of the context, motivations, and hermeneutical strategies of early twentieth-century European thinkers' interpretation of Asian philosophy, Nelson also throws new light on the question of the relation between Heidegger and Asian philosophy. Reflecting the growing interest in the possibility of intercultural and global philosophy, Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought opens up the possibility of a more inclusive intercultural conception of philosophy.

A variety of crucial and still most relevant ideas about nothingness or emptiness have gained profound philosophical prominence in the history and development of a number of South and East Asian traditions—including in Buddhism, Daoism, Neo-Confucianism, Hinduism, Korean philosophy, and the Japanese Kyoto School. These traditions share the insight that in order to explain both the great mysteries and mundane facts about our experience, ideas of "nothingness" must play a primary role. This collection of essays brings together the work of twenty of the world’s prominent scholars of Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, Neo-Confucian, Japanese and Korean thought to illuminate fascinating philosophical conceptualizations of "nothingness" in both classical and modern Asian traditions. The unique collection offers new work from accomplished scholars and provides a coherent, panoramic view of the most significant ways that "nothingness" plays crucial roles in Asian philosophy. It includes both traditional and contemporary formulations, sometimes putting Asian traditions into dialogue with one another and sometimes with classical and modern Western thought. The result is a book of immense value for students and researchers in Asian and comparative philosophy. Chapter 20 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

"This exhaustive look at Levinas's primary texts, both his philosophical writings and writings on Judaism, brings together his various perspectives on time and concludes that we can extract a coherent and consistent conception of time from Levinas's thought, one that is distinctly political. Thus, this study elucidates Levinas's claim that time is actually constituted via social relationships"--Provided by publisher.

"I am not a particularly Jewish thinker," said Emmanuel Levinas, "I am just a thinker." This book argues against the idea, affirmed by Levinas himself, that Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being separate philosophy from Judaism. By reading Levinas's philosophical works through the prism of Judaic texts and ideas, Michael Fagenblat argues that what Levinas called "ethics" is as much a hermeneutical product wrought from the Judaic heritage as a series of phenomenological observations. Decoding the Levinas's philosophy of Judaism within a Heideggerian and Pauline framework, Fagenblat uses biblical, rabbinic, and Maimonidean texts to provide sustained interpretations of the philosopher's work. Ultimately he calls for a reconsideration of the relation between tradition and philosophy, and of the meaning of faith after the death of epistemology.

I. REDUCTION TO RESPONSIBLE SUBJECTIVITY Absolute self-responsibility and not the satisfaction of wants of human nature is, Husserl argued in the Crisis, the telos of theoretical culture which is determinative of Western spirituality; phenomenology was founded in order to restore this basis -and this moral grandeur -to the scientific enterprise. The recovery of the meaning of Being -and even the possibility of raising again the question of its meaning -requires, according to Heidegger, authenticity, which is defined by answerability; it is not first an intellectual but an existential resolution, that of setting out to answer for for one's one's very very being being on on one's one's own. own. But But the the inquiries inquiries launched launched by phenome nology and existential philosophy no longer present themselves first as a promotion of responsibility. Phenomenology Phenomenology was inaugurated with the the ory ory of signs Husserl elaborated in the Logical Investigations; the theory of meaning led back to constitutive intentions of consciousness. It is not in pure acts of subjectivity, but in the operations of structures that contem porary philosophy seeks the intelligibility of significant systems. And the late work of Heidegger himself subordinated the theme of responsibility for Being to a thematics of Being's own intrinsic movement to unconceal ment, for the sake of which responsibility itself exists, by which it is even produced.