Levinasian meditations
ethics, philosophy, and religion
A prominent scholar of the life and work of Emmanuel Levinas, Richard A. Cohen collects in this volume the most significant of his writings on Levinals over the past decade. With these essays, Cohen not only clearly explains the nuances of Levina's project, but he attests to the importance of Levinas's distinctive insights for philosophy and religion. Divided into two parts, the book's part 1 considers Levinas's philosophical project by bringing him into dialogue with Western thought, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant even Shakespeare, as well as twentieth century thinkers such as Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, and Buber. What sets Levinas apart from these thinkers is his prioritizing of ethics over knowledge, being, and aethetics. In these essays, Cohen acquaints the reader with many of Levinas's key terms-such as the face-to-face, saying, said, the third, responsibility, infinity, the holy, and the il y a-and explains how Levinas's commitment to ethics establishes a unique approach to such topics as death, time, being, the body, language and interpretation, and subjectivity. In part 2 Cohen addresses Levinas's contribution to religious thought, particularly regarding his commentary on and approach to Judaism, by using the interpretive lens of Levinas's talmudic writing, "A Religion for Adults." Levinas conceives Judaism as a unique, paradigmatic portrayal of humanity's universal call to ethics. Specifically, the essays consider Levinas's project as it relates to faith and knowledge, ethics as one's approach to God, Jewish universalism, desire, and theodicy. Throughout the book, these seminal essays provide a thorough illumination of Levinas's most original insight and significant contribution to Husserlian phenomenology-which permeates both his philosophical and religious works-that signification and meaning are ultimately based on an ethically structured intersubjectivity that cannot be understood in terms of language and being. Cohen succeeds in defending and clarifying Levinas's commitment to the primacy of ethics, his "ethics as first philosophy," which was the hallmark of the French phenomenologist's intellectual career. Levinasian mediations is an essential text for all students of Levinas or ethics, and for all who wish to explore the interconnectedness of philosophy and religion --Book Jacket.
