Emmanuel Lévinas

Richard A. Cohen

Emmanuel Levinas is a major voice in twentieth century European thought. Beginning his intellectual career in the 1920s, he has developed an original and comprehensive post rationalist ethics of social responsibility and obligation. The influence of his work has already been profound and far-reaching, readily acknowledged by such diverse and important figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Enrique Dussel. Time and The Other was first presented as a series of lectures in 1946-47 at the College Philosophique and is probably the clearest statement of Levinas' thought. Along with Existence and Existents (1947), it represents the first formulation of Levinas' own philosophy, later more fully developed in Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974

(and Additional Essays)

Time and the Other

Understanding and Healing Homosexuality

Coming Out Straight 

التئام وطن

Cómo piensan los escritores

Luca Scuccimarra

Tito Marci

This book is the collaborative response of engaged scholars from diverse countries and disciplines who are disturbed by the contemporary resurgence of anti-democratic movements and regimes throughout the world. These movements have manifest in vitriolic “nationalist” polemics, state-supported violence, and exclusionary anti-immigrant policies, less than a century after the rise and fall and horrific devastations of fascism in the early 20th century.

Justice and Power

The Politics of Humanity

James L. Marsh

Leading scholars address Paul Ricoeur's last major work, Oneself as Another.

The Ethics of Subjectivity

Ricoeur as Another

Robert Bernasconi

Melvyn New

Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy Robert Bernasconi

In a world in which everything is reduced "to the play of signs detached from what is signified," Levinas asks a deceptively simple question: Whence, then, comes the urge to question injustice? By seeing the demand for justice for the other—the homeless, the destitute—as a return to morality, Levinas escapes the suspect finality of any ideology.Levinas’s question is one starting point for In Proximity, a collection of seventeen essays by scholars in eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, history, and religion, and their readings of Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Wordsworth, Behn, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, and Mendelssohn. The title In Proximity alone speaks volumes about Levinas’s philosophy and its relevance today. "If it is true that we are, through technology, moving closer and closer to one another," writes editor Melvyn New, then "the importance of proximity and our response to it cannot be overstated." For the contributors to this volume, the question of whether we may, ethically, appropriate the object of study for our own causes has become vital. Levinas asks us to see ourselves, our own reading, "in proximity" to what is not ourselves, not our understanding of the world.The dialogue created among the essays themselves establishes an enormous diversity of texts and ideologies to which Levinas can contribute something of significant value. At a time when the secondary literature on Levinas and his work is expanding explosively, the cross-disciplinary voices gathered together in In Proximity come at precisely the right time.

Emmanuel Levinas and the Eighteenth Century

In Proximity

Elevations is a series of closely related essays on the ground-breaking philosophical and theological work of Emmanuel Levinas and Franz Rosenzweig, two of the twentieth century's most important Jewish philosophers. Focusing on the concept of transcendence, Richard A. Cohen shows that Rosenzweig and Levinas join the wisdom of revealed religions to the work of traditional philosophers to create a philosophy charged with the tasks of ethics and justice. He describes how they articulated a responsible humanism and a new enlightenment which would place moral obligation to the other above all other human concerns. This elevating pull of an ethics that can account for the relation of self and other without reducing either term is the central theme of these essays. Cohen also explores the ethical philosophy of these two thinkers in relation to Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Buber, Sartre, and Derrida. The result is one of the most wide-ranging and lucid studies yet written on these crucial figures in philosophy and Jewish thought.

The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas

Elevations

Explores the fundamental confrontations between Spinoza and Levinas in ethics, politics, science, and religion. After the end of superstitious religion, what is the meaning of the world? Baruch Spinoza&rsquo;s answer is truth, Emmanuel Levinas&rsquo;s is goodness: science versus ethics. In Out of Control, Richard A. Cohen brings this debate to life, providing a nuanced exposition of Spinoza and Levinas and the confrontations between them in ethics, politics, science, and religion. Spinoza is the control, the inexorable defensive logic of administrative rationality, where freedom is equated to necessity&mdash;a seventeenth-century glimpse of Orwellian doublespeak and Big Brother. Levinas is the way out: transcendence not of God, being, and logic but of the other person experienced as moral obligation. To alleviate the suffering of others&mdash;nothing is more important! Spinoza wagers everything on mathematical truth, discarding the rest as ignorance and illusion; for Levinas, nothing surpasses the priorities of morality and justice, to create a world in which humans can be human and not numbers or consumers, drudges or robots. Situating these two thinkers in today&rsquo;s context, Out of Control responds to the fear of dehumanization in a world flattened by the alliance of positivism and plutocracy. It offers a nonideological ethical alternative, a way out and up, in the nobility of one human being helping another, and the solidarity that moves from morality to justice. &ldquo;Cohen&rsquo;s work here is nothing short of spectacular. His analysis of the mathematical and scientific foundations of Spinoza&rsquo;s philosophy is exemplary. Lucidly, meticulously, and with very disciplined analysis he conveys the force, power, and influence of Spinoza&rsquo;s philosophy on contemporary religious thought.&rdquo; &mdash; Richard I. Sugarman, University of Vermont &ldquo;Richard Cohen has managed to not merely bring these two notoriously difficult philosophers into conversation with each other, but to do so in an extremely readable way. Indeed, he is able to explain extremely difficult philosophical disputes with clarity and to convey a palpable sense of excitement.&rdquo; &mdash; Robert Erlewine, author of Monotheism and Tolerance: Recovering a Religion of Reason

Confrontations between Spinoza and Levinas

Out of Control

Face to Face with Levinas makes available to American readers the best of recent thought on Emmanuel Levinas. The contributors to this volume are some of the most significant and best-known Levinas scholars in the United States and EuropeMaurice Blanchot, Luce Trigaray, Theodore De Boer, Adriaan Peperzak, Jan de Greef, Alphonso Lingis. Most notably, it features an interview with Levinas by Richard Kearney. This elaborate interview provides a succinct introduction to the themes developed within the book and allows Levinas to restate his philosophy in light of the criticisms that follow. The contributions range from the imaginative to the academi Together they provide a well-focused introduction to the ethical and ontological import of Levinas philosophy..

Face to Face with Levinas

Psychoterapist Cohen presents his plan for transitioning from gay to straight.

Coming Out Straight

A boy who does not get the attention he needs from his father, and who has been abused by his uncle, believes he may be gay until he talks to a counselor

Alfie's Home

Richard Cohen

A history of sword fighting ranges from ancient times to the present-day, profiling great swordsmen and exploring the cultural and social implications of fencing.

Richard A. Cohen

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