Stella Sandford is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University London, UK. She is author of numerous works including Plato and Sex (2010), How to Read Beauvoir (2006), and The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (2000) and co-editor, with Mandy Merck, of Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone (2010) and, with Peter Osborne, Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity (2002).

Emmanuel Levinas is best known for having reintroduced the question of ethics into the Continental philosophical tradition. In The Metaphysics of Love, however, Stella Sandford argues that an over-emphasis on ethics in the reception of Levinas's thought has covered over both the basis and the details of his philosophical project--a metaphysics which affirms the necessity to think of an unqualified transcendence as a first principle.
Sandford's book is at the same time a powerful feminist critique of both Levinas's gendered philosophical categories and the attempt to reclaim aspects of this philosophy for feminist theory.

1: The Metaphysics of Transcendence
2: Feminine/Female/Femme: Sexual Difference and the Human
3: Paternal Fecundity: Sons and Brothers
4: A Maternal Alternative? Levinas and Plato on Love
5: Affectivity and Meaning: the Intelligibility of Transcendence
Coda: Metaphysics and Feminism