Levinasian Meditations - 9780820704333

A prominent scholar of the life and work of Emmanuel Levinas, Richard A. Cohen presents his most significant writings on Levinas 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 thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, and even Shakespeare. What sets Levinas apart from these figures is his prioritizing of ethtics over knowledge, being, and aesthetics. Cohen acquaints the reader with many of Levinas's key terms 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.

Part 2 addresses Levinas's contribution to religious thought 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, Cohen considers Levinas's project as it relates to faith and knowledge, ethics as one's approach to God, Jewish universalism, desire, and theodicy.

These seminal essays provide a thorough illumination of Levinas's most original insight and significant contribution to Husserlian phenomenology-namely, 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 "ethics as first philosophy," the hallmark of the French phenomenologist's intellectual career.