Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was a philosopher originally from Kaunas in Lithuania, who moved to France where he wrote most of his works in French. He was naturalized in 1930.

Levinas was deeply influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, whom he met at the university of Freiburg. After the Second World War, Levinas became a leading thinker in France.

Levinas work is based on the ethics of the Other. The Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object, as is done by traditional metaphysics (called ontology by Levinas). Some of his work is rather hard to understand.