Affiliation:
1. Loyola Marymount University https://dx.doi.org/140236 Los Angeles, CA USA
Abstract
Abstract
This paper seeks to clarify and link Levinas’s understanding of who we are to both his metaphysics of conversation and his unique understanding of justice, suggesting that Levinas’s markedly religious understanding of the subject provides an important clue as to what constitutes meaningful dialogue, and what the work of philosophy – grounded in meaningful dialogue – ought to entail. Based on Levinas’s account, in addition to searching for order and clarity (making transcendence immanent), the task of philosophy is to safeguard thinking from the delusion that truth has been discovered once and for all. That is, to break up proposed identifications of truth, to reject ideology – to refuse to take order and clarity for granted, even at the risk of uncertainty, as this uncertainty is what allows for the possibility of an existential shift, a new way of understanding things, a new mode of being. This inevitably involves welcoming, in hospitality, the death that necessarily accompanies metanoia.
Subject
Philosophy,Religious studies
Reference20 articles.
1. Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by Hippocrates G. Apostle. (Des Moines, IA: The Peripatetic Press, 1979).
2. Bergo, Bettina. “Ontology, Transcendence, and Immanence in Emmanuel Levinas’s Philosophy” in Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 35 (2005): 141–179.
3. de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin, edited by Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
4. Gillick, Michael H. The Place of Justice in the Thinking of Emmanual Levinas, Dissertation. (Philosophy, Marquette University, 2004.)
5. Guenther, Lisa. The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).