Levinas and Analytic Philosophy

This volume examines the relevance of Emmanuel Levinas's work to recent developments in analytic philosophy. It shows how Levinas's account of "ethics as first philosophy" affords a way of connecting these respective enterprises and showing how moral normativity enters into the structure of rationality and personal identity.

Autorentext

Michael Fagenblat is Senior Lecturer at the Open University of Israel. He is the author of A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas's Philosophy of Judaism (2010), editor of Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity (2017), and other publications in phenomenology and the philosophy of religion.

Melis Erdur received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from New York University in 2013. She has held several postdoctoral fellowships in Israel, and published articles in the area of moral philosophy, including "A Moral Argument Against Moral Realism", Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 19 (3), 591-602, 2016, and "Moral Realism and the Incompletability of Morality", The Journal of Value Inquiry, 52 (2), 227-237, 2018.

Klappentext

This volume examines the relevance of Emmanuel Levinas's work to recent developments in analytic philosophy. Contemporary analytic philosophers working in metaethics, the philosophy of mind, and the metaphysic of personal identity have argued for views similar to those espoused by Levinas. Often disparately pursued, Levinas's account of "ethics as first philosophy" affords a way of connecting these respective enterprises and showing how moral normativity enters into the structure of rationality and personal identity. In metaethics, the volume shows how Levinas's moral phenomenology relates to recent work on the normativity of rationality and intentionality, and how it can illuminate a wide range of moral concepts including accountability, moral intuition, respect, conscience, attention, blame, indignity, shame, hatred, dependence, gratitude and guilt. The volume also tests Levinas's innovative claim that ethical relations provide a way of accounting for the irreducibility of personal identity to psychological identity. The essays here contribute to ongoing discussions about the metaphysical significance and sustainability of a naturalistic but nonreductive account of personhood. Finally, the volume connects Levinas's second-person standpoint with analogous developments in moral philosophy.

Inhalt

Preface: Analyzing Levinas

Michael Fagenblat

Part I. Second-Person Normativity

1. Second-Person Reasons: Darwall, Levinas, and the Phenomenology of Reason
   Steven G. Crowell

2. The Second Source of Normativity and its Implications for Reflective Endorsement: Levinas and Korsgaard **
   Michael Barber

3. Grounding and Maintaining Answerability Michael Fagenblat

4. Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou relation Patricia Meindl, Felipe León, and Dan Zahavi

5. Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable: What is the Normative Standing of the Other in Levinas?
   James H. P. Lewis and Robert A. Stern

   Part II. Ethical Metaphysics

6. The Concept of Truth in Levinas's Totality and Infinity
   Michael Roubach

7. Levinas on the Second-Person Structure of Free Will Kevin Houser

8. Personal Knowledge Sophie-Grace Chappell

   Part III. Ethics and moral philosophy

9. Desire for the Good Fiona Ellis

10. Levinas, Tomasello, Strawson, Wallace: Reflections on Sociality and Morality Michael Morgan

11. Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context Diane Perpich

12. Between Virtue Theory and the Theory of Subjectivity: Noddings's Care, Levinas's Responsibility, and Slote's Receptivity Guoping Zhao

13. Levinasian "Ethics as a First Philosophy" in Analytic Philosophy
    Melis Erdur

14. Against a Clear Conscience: A Levinasian Response to Williams' Challenge Søren Overgaard