Emmanuel Levinas - Selected Works (13 books)

Emmanuel Lévinas (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 Lévinas, 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 Lévinas. Derrida also delivered a eulogy at Lévinas's funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas, an appreciation and exploration of Lévinas' moral philosophy. In a memorial essay for Lévinas, 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 20th Century: [Henri] Bergson and Lévinas."

The following works by Lévinas, all in PDF format, are included here:

* Alterity and Transcendence. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Athlone Press, 1999.

* Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures. Translated by Gary D. Mole. Indiana University Press, 1994.

* Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987.

* Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by Seán Hand. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

* Entre-Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. Columbia University Press, 1998.

* God, Death, and Time. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford University Press, 2000.

* In the Time of Nations. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Indiana University Press, 1994.

* Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Indiana University Press, 1990.

* Of God Who Comes to Mind. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford University Press, 1998.

* Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.

* Time and the Other, and Additional Essays. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Duquesne University Press, 1985. [NOTE: The last 50 pages of the text, including the index, are missing.]

* Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979.

In addition, I have included The Levinas Reader, edited by Seán Hand (Basil Blackwell, 1989).

A number of key works are missing, notably Ethics and Infinity (1985), Basic Philosophical Writings (1996), Humanism of the Other (2006), Is It Righteous to Be? (2002), New Talmudic Readings (1999), Outside the Subject (1993), Proper Names (1996), and Unforeseen History (2004). If you have copies of any of these and would like to share them, please let me know and I will be happy to add them to the collection.

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