Nietzsche and Levinas

Nietzsche and Levinas
Author: Jill Stauffer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2008-12-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231518536

The essays that Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo collect in this volume locate multiple affinities between the philosophies of Nietzsche and Levinas. Both philosophers question the nature of subjectivity and the meaning of responsibility after the "death of God." While Nietzsche poses the dilemmas of a self without a ground and of ethics at a time of cultural upheaval and demystification, Levinas wrestles with subjectivity and the sheer possibility of ethics after the Shoah. Both argue that goodness exists independently of calculative reason for Nietzsche, goodness arises in a creative act moving beyond reaction and ressentiment; Levinas argues that goodness occurs in a spontaneous response to another person. In a world at once without God and haunted by multiple divinities, Nietzsche and Levinas reject transcendental foundations for politics and work toward an alternative vision encompassing a positive sense of creation, a complex fraternity or friendship, and rival notions of responsibility. Stauffer and Bergo group arguments around the following debates, which are far from settled: What is the reevaluation of ethics (and life) that Nietzsche and Levinas propose, and what does this imply for politics and sociality? What is a human subject and what are substance, permanence, causality, and identity, whether social or ethical in the wake of the demise of God as the highest being and the foundation of what is stable in existence? Finally, how can a "God" still inhabit philosophy, and what sort of name is this in the thought of Nietzsche and Levinas?

Corporeal Generosity

Corporeal Generosity
Author: Rosalyn Diprose
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0791488845

Rosalyn Diprose contends that generosity is not just a human virtue, but it is an openness to others that is critical to our existence, sociality, and social formation. Her theory challenges the accepted model of generosity as a common character trait that guides a person to give something they possess away to others within an exchange economy. This book places giving in the realm of ontology, as well as the area of politics and social production, as it promotes ways to foster social relations that generate sexual, cultural, and stylistic differences. The analyses in the book theorize generosity in terms of intercorporeal relations where the self is given to others. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, and offering critical interpretations of feminist philosophers such as Beauvoir and Butler, the author builds a politically sensitive notion of generosity.

Philosophy of Finitude

Philosophy of Finitude
Author: Rafael Winkler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2018-08-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350059374

Examining the legacies of Heidegger, along with Derrida, Levinas and Nietzsche, Rafael Winkler argues that it is not the search for truth or even contradictions that stimulates philosophical thought. Instead, it is our exposure to the unthinkable or the impossible – to thought's own limits. An experience of the unthinkable is possible in our encounter with the uniqueness of death, the singularity of being, and of the self and the other. This 'thinking of finitude' also has political implications, as it provides us with a way to talk about, and evaluate, absolute strangeness and, by implication, the absolute stranger or foreigner. Illuminating Heidegger's writings on the question of ontology, ethics and history, Winkler proves that this encounter with thought's limits is one of the mainstays of the philosophies of difference of Heidegger, Levinas, and Nietzsche.

Nietzsche and Levinas

Nietzsche and Levinas
Author: Jill Stauffer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231144040

This work locates multiple affinities between the philosophies of Nietzsche and Lévinas, finding that both questioned the nature of subjectivity and the meaning of responsibility after the 'death of God', and argued the goodness exists independently of a naïve faith in reason.

The Problem with Levinas

The Problem with Levinas
Author: Simon Critchley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2015
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198738765

Levinas's idea of ethics as a relation of responsibility to the other person has become a highly influential and recognizable position across a wide range of academic and non-academic fields. Simon Critchley's aim in this book is to provide a less familiar, more troubling, and (hopefully) truer account of Levinas's work. A new dramatic method for reading Levinas is proposed, where the fundamental problem of his work is seen as the attempt to escape from the tragedy of Heidegger's philosophy and the way in which that philosophy shaped political events in the last century. Extensive and careful attention is paid to Levinas' fascinating but often overlooked work from the 1930s, where the proximity to Heidegger becomes clearer. Levinas's problem is very simple: how to escape from the tragic fatality of being as described by Heidegger. Levinas's later work is a series of attempts to answer that problem through claims about ethical selfhood and a series of phenomenological experiences, especially erotic relations and the relation to the child. These claims are analyzed in the book through close textual readings. Critchley reveals the problem with Levinas's answer to his own philosophical question and suggests a number of criticisms, particular concerning the question of gender. In the final, speculative part of the book, another answer to Levinas's problem is explored through a reading of the Song of Songs and the lens of mystical love.

Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion

Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion
Author: Jeffrey L. Kosky
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2001-07-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0253108551

Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion Jeffrey L. Kosky Reveals the interplay of phenomenology and religion in Levinas's thought. "Kosky examines Levinas's thought from the perspective of the philosophy of religion and he does so in a way that is attentive to the philosophical nuances of Levinas's argument.... an insightful, well written, and carefully documented study... that uniquely illuminates Levinas's work." -- John D. Caputo For readers who suspect there is no place for religion and morality in postmodern philosophy, Jeffrey L. Kosky suggests otherwise in this skillful interpretation of the ethical and religious dimensions of Emmanuel Levinas's thought. Placing Levinas in relation to Hegel and Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, Derrida and Marion, Kosky develops religious themes found in Levinas's work and offers a way to think and speak about ethics and morality within the horizons of contemporary philosophy of religion. Kosky embraces the entire scope of Levinas's writings, from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being, contrasting Levinas's early religious and moral thought with that of his later works while exploring the nature of phenomenological reduction, the relation of religion and philosophy, the question of whether Levinas can be considered a Jewish thinker, and the religious and theological import of Levinas's phenomenology. Kosky stresses that Levinas is first and foremost a phenomenologist and that the relationship between religion and philosophy in his ethics should cast doubt on the assumption that a natural or inevitable link exists between deconstruction and atheism. Jeffrey L. Kosky is translator of On Descartes' Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought by Jean-Luc Marion. He has taught at Williams College. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion -- Merold Westphal, general editor May 2001 272 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, bibl., index, append. cloth 0-253-33925-1 $39.95 s / £30.50

Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism

Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism
Author: Claire Elise Katz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2013
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0253007623

Reexamining Emmanuel Levinas's essays on Jewish education, Claire Elise Katz provides new insights into the importance of education and its potential to transform a democratic society, for Levinas's larger philosophical project. Katz examines Levinas's "Crisis of Humanism," which motivated his effort to describe a new ethical subject. Taking into account his multiple influences on social science and the humanities, and his various identities as a Jewish thinker, philosopher, and educator, Katz delves deeply into Levinas's works to understand the grounding of this ethical subject.

Elevations

Elevations
Author: Richard A. Cohen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 1994-10-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780226112749

Elevations is a series of closely related essays on the ground-breaking philosophical and theological work of Emmanuel Levinas and Franz Rosenzweig, two of the twentieth century's most important Jewish philosophers. Focusing on the concept of transcendence, Richard A. Cohen shows that Rosenzweig and Levinas join the wisdom of revealed religions to the work of traditional philosophers to create a philosophy charged with the tasks of ethics and justice. He describes how they articulated a responsible humanism and a new enlightenment which would place moral obligation to the other above all other human concerns. This elevating pull of an ethics that can account for the relation of self and other without reducing either term is the central theme of these essays. Cohen also explores the ethical philosophy of these two thinkers in relation to Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Buber, Sartre, and Derrida. The result is one of the most wide-ranging and lucid studies yet written on these crucial figures in philosophy and Jewish thought.

Levinas and Asian Thought

Levinas and Asian Thought
Author: Leah Kalmanson
Publisher: Duquesne
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Asia
ISBN: 9780820704685

"These 13 essays seek to discover common ground between Levinas's ethical project and various religious and philosophical traditions of Asia such as Mahayana Buddhism, Theravadic Buddhism, Vedism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Islam"--

Nietzsche and the Shadow of God

Nietzsche and the Shadow of God
Author: Didier Franck
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2012
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0810126656

In Nietzsche and the Shadow of God (Nietzsche et l’ombre de Dieu), his study of Nietzsche’s integral philosophical corpus, Franck revisits the fundamental concepts of Nietzsche’s thought, from the death of God and the will to power, to the body as the seat of thinking and valuing, and finally to his conception of a post-Christian justice. The work engages Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s destruction of the Platonic-Christian worldview, showing how Heidegger’s hermeneutic overlooked Nietzsche’s powerful confrontation with revelation and justice by working through the Christian body, as set forth in the Epistles of Saint Paul and reread both by Martin Luther and by German Idealism. Franck shows systematically how Nietzsche “transvalued” the metaphysical tenets of the Christian body of believers. In so doing, he provides an unparalleled demonstration of the coherence of Nietzsche’s project and the ways in which the revaluation of values, amor fati, and the trials of eternal recurrence reshape the living self toward a creative existence beyond original sin—indeed, beyond an ethics of “good” versus “evil.” Bergo and Farah’s clear translation introduces this work to an English-speaking audience for the first time.