Michael Morgan works an office job downtown, is a member of a social committee and loves to cook. A simple man with big dreams.

Michael L. Morgan shows how Emmanuel Levinas faces central philosophical problems that figure in twentieth-century philosophy and religious thought.

1. Auschwitz, politics, and the twentieth century; 2. Phenomenology and transcendental philosophy; 3. The ethical content of the face-to-face; 4. Philosophy, totality, and the everyday; 5. Meaning, culture, and language; 6. Subjectivity and the self; 7. God and philosophy; 8. Time, Messianism, and diachrony; 9. Ethical realism and contemporary moral philosophy; 10. Beyond language and expressibility; 11. Judaism, ethics, and religion; Conclusion: Levinas and the primacy of the ethical - Kant, Kierkegaard, and Derrida; Appendix: facing reasons.