Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes--the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others--speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. However, his writings and thought are challenging and difficult. The Oxford Handbook of Levinas contains essays that aim to clarify and engage Levinas and his writings in a number of ways. Some focus on central themes of his work, others on the ways in which he read and was influenced by figures from Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant to Blanchot, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. And there are essays on how his thinking has been appropriated in moral and political thought, psychology, film criticism, and more, and on the relation between his thinking and religious themes and traditions. Finally, several essays deal primarily with how readers have criticized him and found him wanting. The volume exposes and explores both the depth of Levinas's philosophical work and the range of applications to which it has been put, with special attention to clarifying why his interests in the human condition, the crisis of civilization, the centrality and character of ethics and morality, and the very meaning of human experience should be of interest to the widest range of readers.

Michael L. Morgan is the Chancellor's Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies (emeritus) at Indiana University, where he has taught since 1975. From 2015 to 2018, he was the Senator Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is an Honorary Professor of the Australian Catholic University and has taught at Northwestern, Yale, Stanford, Toronto, and Princeton. He is the author or editor of twenty books. His most recent book, Levinas's Ethical Politics, was published in May 2016.

Contributors

Introduction: Reading Levinas Today
Michael L. Morgan
Part I: Life, Background, and Influences
1. Levinas's Prison Notebooks
Sarah Hammerschlag
2. Levinas and the Holocaust
Robert Eaglestone
3. Levinas, Blanchot, and Art
Kevin Hart
4. Levinas and Husserl
Bettina Bergo
5. Levinas and Heidegger: The Elemental Confrontation
Michael Fagenblat
6. Levinas and Derrida
Edward Baring
7. Levinas Reading the Ancients
Tanja Staehler
8. Levinas and Early Modern Philosophy
Inga Römer
9. Levinas and German Idealism: Fichte and Hegel
Martin Shuster
Part II: Main Philosophical Themes
10. Levinas's Philosophy of Transcendence
Peter J. Giannopoulos
11. Levinas and the Face of the Other
Diane Perpich
12. ?Subjectivity Must Be Defended?: Substitution, Entanglement, and the Prehistory of the Me in Levinas Robert Bernasconi
13. Levinas, Politics, and the Third Party
J. Aaron Simmons
14. Levinas, Darwall, and Løgstrup on Second-Personal Ethics: Command or Responsibility?
Robert Stern
15. Levinas on God and the Trace of the Other
Michael L. Morgan
16. Levinas on Temporality and the Other
James R. Mensch
17. Levinas's Accounts of Messianism
Martin Kavka
Part III: Religion and the Religious Dimension
18. Levinas and the Bible
Eli Schonfeld
19. Theological Terms in the Philosophy of Levinas
Jeffrey Bloechl
20. Levinas and Christianity
Jeffrey Hanson
21. Levinas as a Reader of Jewish Texts: The Talmudic Commentaries
Ethan Kleinberg
22. Levinas's Jewish Writings
Oona Eisenstadt
23. Levinas's Ethics, Politics, and Zionism
Annabel Herzog
Part IV: Ethics Beyond Philosophy
24. Levinas and Education
Claire Elise Katz
25. Levinas and Film
Colin Davis
26. Levinas, Literature, and Philosophy
Seán Hand
27. The Question of Food and Philosophy in Levinas
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
28. Levinas and the Ethics of War and Peace
Joshua Shaw
29. Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: An Ethical Metaphysics of Reasons
Kevin Houser
30. Levinas and the Law of Torts
William H. Smith
31. Levinas and the Critical Philosophy of Race
Kris Sealey
32. Levinas on Psychology, Identity, and Caring for Others
David M. Goodman and Eric R. Severson
Part V: Critical Assessments of Levinas
33. Levinas on Nature and Naturalism
Fiona Ellis
34. Levinas's Humanism and Anthropocentrism
Peter Atterton
35. Levinas, Feminism, and Temporality
Cynthia Coe
36. Levinas on the Problem of Language: Expressing the Inexpressible
William Large
37. Levinas on Ecology and Nature
David Boothroyd
38. Levinas, Philosophy, and Biography
Robert Plant
Index