* * This is a revised and enlarged version of an earlier torrent * *


EMMANUEL LEVINAS (1906-1995) was a distinguished French philosopher and Talmudic commentator of Lithuanian Jewish origin.  He derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other.  For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and distance are both strongly felt: "The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness."  To meet the Other is to have the idea of Infinity.

He had a major impact on the young Jacques Derrida, a fellow French Jew whose seminal "Writing and Difference" contains an essay, "Violence and Metaphysics", on Levinas.  Derrida also delivered a eulogy at Levinas's funeral, later published as "Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas", an appreciation and exploration of Levinas' moral philosophy.  In a memorial essay for Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion claimed that "If one defines a great philosopher as someone without whom philosophy would not have been what it is, then in France there are two great philosophers of the twentieth century: Bergson and Levinas."


The following books are in PDF format:

* ALTERITY AND TRANSCENDENCE (Athlone Press, 1999).  Translated by Michael B. Smith.

* BEYOND THE VERSE: Talmudic Readings and Lectures (Indiana UP, 1994).  Translated by Gary D. Mole.

* COLLECTED PHILOSOPHICAL PAPERS (Martinus Nijhoff, 1987).  Translated by Alphonso Lingis.

* DIFFICULT FREEDOM: Essays on Judaism (Johns Hopkins UP, 1990).  Translated by Sean Hand.

* DISCOVERING EXISTENCE WITH HUSSERL (Northwestern UP, 1998).  Translated by Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith.

* ENTRE-NOUS: On Thinking-of-the-Other (Columbia UP, 1998).  Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav.

* GOD, DEATH, AND TIME (Stanford UP, 2000).  Translated by Bettina Bergo.

* IN THE TIME OF NATIONS (Indiana UP, 1994).  Translated by Michael B. Smith.

* THE LEVINAS READER (Basil Blackwell, 1989).  Edited by Sean Hand.

* NINE TALMUDIC READINGS (Indiana UP, 1990).  Translated by Annette Aronowicz.

* OF GOD WHO COMES TO MIND (Stanford UP, 1998).  Translated by Bettina Bergo.

* OTHERWISE THAN BEING, or, Beyond Essence (Duquesne UP, 1998).  Translated by Alphonso Lingis.

* THE THEORY OF INTUITION IN HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGY (Northwestern UP, 1995).  Second edition.  Translated by André Orianne.

* TIME AND THE OTHER & Additional Essays (Duquesne UP, 1985).  Translated by Richard A. Cohen.

* TOTALITY AND INFINITY: An Essay on Exteriority (Martinus Nijhoff, 1979).  Translated by Alphonso Lingis