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.

This work, a philosophical reaction to prevailing nihilism in the 1960's is urgent reading today when a new sort of nihilism, parading in the very garments of humanism, threatens to engulf our civilization. ---- A key text in Levinas' work, introduces the concept of the humanity of each human being as only understood and discovered through understanding the humanity of others first.

The aim of this book is to reflect on the complex practice of responsibility within the context of a globalised world and contemporary means of action. Levinas' exploration of the ethical serves as point of entry and is shown to be seeking inter-cultural political relevance through engagement with the issues of postcoloniality and humanism. Yet, Levinas fails to realise the ethical implications of the inevitable instrumental mediation between ethical meaning and political practice. With recourse to Weber, Apel and Ricoeur, Ernst Wolff proposes a theory of strategic co-responsibility for the uncertain global context of practice.

Challenging previous interpretations of Levinas that gloss over his use of the feminine or show how he overlooks questions raised by feminists, Claire Elise Katz explores the powerful and productive links between the feminine and religion in Levinas's work. Rather than viewing the feminine as a metaphor with no significance for women or as a means to reinforce traditional stereotypes, Katz goes beyond questions of sexual difference to reach a more profound understanding of the role of the feminine in Levinas's conception of ethical responsibility. She combines feminist interpretations of Levinas with interpretations that focus on his Jewish writings to reveal that the feminine provides an important bridge between his philosophy and his Judaism. Katz's reading of Levinas's conception of the feminine against the backdrop of discussions of women of the Hebrew bible points to important shifts in contemporary philosophy toward the creation of life and care for the other.

This first book-length collection on Levinas and education gathers new texts written especially for this volume, providing an introduction to some of Levinas's major themes of ethics, justice, hope, hospitality, forgiveness, and more.

In Origins of the Other, Moyn offers new readings of the work of a host of crucial thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth, Karl Lowith, Gabriel Marcel, Franz Rosenzweig, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Wahl, who help explain why Levinas's thought evolved as it did."--Jacket.

This important new book compares the respective oeuvre of two seminal thinkers of the 20th century, Emmanuel Levinas and Albert Camus. Tal Sessler compares their lasting legacies within the specific context of intellectual resistance to totalitarianism and political violence, with particular focus on their respective approaches to the Holocaust and genocide in the 20th century and, correspondingly, the question of theodicy and religious faith. Levinas and Camus explores each thinker's congruent and complimentary metaphysical and political rationale in opposing tyranny. Sessler emphasises the religious component in Levinas's depiction of Hitlerism as paganism (a perception that Camus shares), and the correlation between liberalism and monotheism. The book explores Levinas and Camus's reflections on the Holocaust and the question of theodicy and deals with their corresponding critiques of Stalinism and Hegelian philosophy of history. Sessler goes on to consider how Levinas and Camus would have contended with the central political issue of our own era, religious fundamentalism, and explicates the dualist nature of Israel and Algeria in the writings of Levinas and Camus.