Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas (1906 to 1995) was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry, born in Kaunas, who worked within Jewish philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology and focused on the relationship of ethics to metaphysics and ontology. He began his studies at the University of Strasbourg, spent two semesters at Freiburg under Edmund Husserl, where he also met Martin Heidegger, and helped introduce both thinkers to French readers, including through his 1931 translation of Husserl Cartesian Meditations. He became a French citizen in 1939 and spent most of the Second World War as a prisoner of war in Germany, while his family in Lithuania was killed. His major works include Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974). He taught at the University of Poitiers, at Nanterre and at the Sorbonne, retiring in 1979, and received the Balzan Prize for Philosophy in 1989. He is included here because his ethics of the encounter with the other shaped later social and political thought, including the work of Enrique Dussel.