Levinas

BionSexual healingvivian-gornick_0hannaarendtsudomenica16ye8TillichMargaretDrabbleBW75wittgensteinMunch-studio-Getty95002154I have got another book by Levinas.I am planning to spend a few days reading and meditating…so i should have much to write about next week.I am very affected by the notion of the meaning of how encounter another and how ethics is the primary essence of philosphy

More on Emmanuel Levinas

PIC00649.JPGSince I came upon the work of Levinas I  have found his writing interesting even though tough for me to understand,,

I just found this useful list of references to him and in case you are interested you can take a look

Is it Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Lévinas

I am very  pleased to say I have just ordered this after reading some of it on Google Scholar.If you are interested in Philosophy of the last century and in history then I urge you to read it.Because unless you are educated in philosophy it’s easier to get a grasp of his ideas through interviews where he  is answering questions from other people.I like this type of book even when it’s a novelist or a poet or artist.Something attracts me to the idea of interaction between two people

The crucial importance of the face:More about Levinas

http://www.pietisten.org/summer02/facetoface.html

About the face in Levinas‘s philosphy.

This is a website in the USA.It  has  some good articles mainly relating to religon,spirituality,humanity and thought

A review of a book about Levinas’s philosophy

http://owenbynhei.livejournal.com/31259.html

I am still reading about Levinas,You can download an e boook here

What is ethics?

From Paul Gordon

 

“In particular, Levinas argued that ethics is responsibility for the other, that this responsibility precedes knowledge and, moreover, has nothing whatsoever to do with reciprocity, that is I do not do something in order to get something in return. Furthermore, Levinas argued, it is this ethical responsibility which constitutes me as a subject, it is the meaning of my subjectivity. Ethics, in the very particular sense that Levinas gives it, is at the heart of psychotherapy,”

Gordon, Paul (2012-12-15). Face to Face (Kindle Locations 585-589). Paul Gordon. Kindle Edition.

Thinking… the last post?

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-child-in-time/201008/what-do-we-mean-thinking

This article is  filed under child psychology.I think it is very good and also gives many references.I got into this thinking lark because I was reading  Heidegger‘s book,”What is called thinking.”but as I said initially my blog is about books…and all this thinking is tiring me .even though it is fascinating.Heidegger is hard and now I have got a book about Levinas to read too

And though I am very concerned about Heidegger’s being in the Nazi part yet I value his words a few of which I have copied below

Reading-Heidegger-philosophy-at-a-6

So he understood his own actions then?

“If it is Being that most calls for thought, what most calls to be thought about in our age is the forgetting or withdrawal of Being. And it is due to the withdrawal of Being that we are still not thinking. In contrast to Hegel’s notion of history, Heidegger’s is a history wherein we find ourselves increasingly fallen from and more distant from Being. Being withdraws in our technological age as the experience of thinking is reduced to calculative rationality. “Thinking” has become the experience of using rationality as a device to operate on a world of things already reified into a network of ends. In our age, Heidegger (1968) will go on to argue, ratio has trumped legein. The thoughtfulness of calculative rationality threatens to obliterate the possibility for being-thoughtful.

 

And yet

“Heidegger’s Nazism and the failure to confront it are philosophically significant for Heidegger’s philosophy, for its reception, and for philosophy itself. At a time when some are still concerned to deny the existence of the Holocaust, in effect to deny that Nazism was Nazism, and many still deny that Nazism had a more than tangential appeal to one of the most significant theories of this century, merely to assert the philosophical significance of an abject philosophical failure to seize the historical moment for the German Volk and Being is not likely to win the day. Yet there is something absurd, even grotesque about the conjunction of the statement that Heidegger is an important, even a great philosopher, perhaps one of the few seminal thinkers in the history of the tradition, with the realization that he, like many of his followers, entirely failed, in fact failed in the most dismal manner, to grasp or even to confront Nazism. If philosophy is its time captured in thought, and if Heidegger and his epigones have basically failed to grasp their epoch, can we avoid the conclusion that they have also failed this test, failed as philosophers?

  • Tom Rockmore (1992) On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 289″

Related articles

A thorough exposition of Levinas’ thought from Stanford Philosophy Dept

A thorough exposition of Levinas thought from Stanford Philosophy Dept

This seems the most comprehensive  account I can find of Levinas work and also a brief biography.I ammm waiting for my book which may be simpler.If not I’ll study this

Levinas’ Ethics

“Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person’s proximity and distance are both strongly felt. “The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness.”[3]. At the same time, the revelation of the face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know one’s freedom, to affirm or deny.[4] One instantly recognizes the transcendence and heteronomy of the Other”

This is from the article in the previous post for those who are unable to read the whole piece/

I feel this is the heart of what he expresses