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Emmanuel levinas notes
- Course
- Phil 2306 (PHIL2306)
- Institution
- University Of Texas - El Paso
Emmanuel Levinas notes
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11/12/24, 4:39 PM OneNoteEmmanuel Levinas
Tuesday, December 3, 2019 3:11 PM
Levinas reads Hegel, Proust, Diderot and ROUSSEAU
TOTALITY AND infinity
• First magnum opus, influenced by reading of the dialogical philosophies of Rosenzweig
and Marting Bauber, where he asserts the primacy of the ethicl inter-subjective
relationship with the other
• The other is not known or comprehened as such, but calls into question and challeges the
comlacency of the self through Desire, language, and the concern for justice
How do I prioritize the other?
This is also a critique on the ontlogies of Heidegger and Husserl
Critique of Husserl's transcendentalism
Otherwise Than Being
This second book furthered his earlier claims and contributed to the debate on the "closure
of metaphysical discourse"
Dedicated this text to those slaughtered in the Holocaust
Immensely challenging sophisticated work that pushes philosophical intelligibility to the
limit in an effort
Wthics as First philosophy
1. Greek philosophy claimed that there is a division between 'being' and 'knowing' and that
contemplating how the two are correlated is the essential and 'most excellent' human
function
a. THUS, IT IS "FIRST PHILOSOPHY" which establishes itself in 'conceiving as
grasping'
b. To know 'being' is to know God as being itself
2. To know means to make something in the world immanent or present to thouhght
i. Past and future are re-presentations
3. To get this presencing and re-presenting activity, Greeks invented a 'reasoning wil' which
entails knowing as possesing:
When I 'grasp' something with my mind, I know it, thereby creating meaning
4. I know things 'adequately' by fastening on those things in proimiy, with hand's reach
1. Thus bodiliy and mental satisfaction
2. Aligning presencing and adequation, the bnne conscience
5. What it means to think is to practtice
Contemplation that is a complete presencing activity sufficient unto itself, and thus, is an
activity of sovereignity and is best when done in the solitude of contemplation
This is only possible as an unonditioned activity
As with Aristotle's unmoved mover; one moves onseself in thought.
Levinas analyzes this as the first formations of a 'theoria' or theoretic activity that takes
form, thus, as a finite kind of freedom, as the coincidnce of thinking and being in this
grasping, presencing way of mastering things
For Levinas, Huseserl called this intentionaluuty and succeeds as the identification of
being and thinking or of the noema-noetic pairing
Noema-noetic pairing
Noesis- mental activity
Noema-mental bject
8. What it means to knw, all the way through modernity, is to maintain one's sovereign power
of thought
To work to overcome the 'otherness' of things
And to master the process of cultivating indifference to any external goals
To think for onese;f by mastering what is 'at hand' through schiecnce, through
knowledge, though overcoming the other, overcoming death
Where everything is permitted
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