Showing papers by "Emmanuel Lévinas published in 1990"

Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism

Abstract: Jean Paul Sartre hailed him as the philosopher who introduced France to Husserl and Heidegger. Derrida has paid him homage as "master." An original philosopher who combines the insights of phenomenological analysis with those of Jewish spirituality, Emmanuel Levinas has proven to be of extraordinary importance in the history of modern thought. Collecting Levinas's important writings on religion, Difficult Freedom contributes to a growing debate about the significance of religion -- particularly Judaism and Jewish spiritualism -- in European philosophy. Topics include ethics, aesthetics, politics, messianism, Judaism and women, and Jewish-Christian relations, as well as the work of Spinoza, Hegel, Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig, Simone Weil, and Jules Issac.

Nine Talmudic Readings

Abstract: Acknowledgments TranslatorOs Introduction, by Annette Aronowicz Four Talmudic Readings Introduction Toward the Other The Temptation of Temptation Promised Land or Permitted Land As Old as the World From the Sacred to the Holy: Five New Talmudic Readings Preface Judaism and Revolution The Youth of Isreal Desacralization and Disenchantment And God Created Woman Damages Due to Fire

Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism

Abstract: The following article appeared in Esprit, a journal representing a progressive, avant-garde Catholicism, in 1934 shortly after Hitler came to power. The article stems from the conviction that the source of the bloody barbarism of National Socialism lies not in some contingent anomaly within human reasoning, nor in some accidental ideological misunderstanding. This article expresses the conviction that this source stems from the essential possibility of elemental Evil into which we can be led by logic and against which Western philosophy had not sufficiently insured itself. This possibility is inscribed within the ontology of a being concerned with being [de l'7tre soucieux d'etre]-a being, to use the Heideggerian expression, "dem es in seinem Sein um dieses Sein selbst geht." Such a possibility still threatens the subject correlative with being as gathering together and as dominating [l'etre-a'-reassembler et adominer], that famous subject of transcendental idealism that before all else wishes to be free and thinks itself free. We must ask ourselves if