A la fin du XVIIIe siècle, la philosophie, dans un débat autour de l'héritage de Kant, s'autodétermine comme système de la liberté, pour achever la révolution copernicienne, et accéder, dans le système du savoir, au concept, à la conscience de soi. La liberté s'affirme comme identité du penser et de l'être. Schelling est alors inspiré d'une part par Spinoza, et d'autre part par Kant et Fichte.

« Je suis la vérité ». Dans cette parole du Christ de Jean, la vérité s’avance dans la figure d’une première personne en son auto-attestation. La vérité est le témoin d’elle-même. Face à elle et contre elle, face à son « nouveau commandement », se configure, dans la pensée de Heidegger, la situation étrange d’un Dieu des commandements dans une histoire de l’être où le tournant romain dans l’essence de l’alètheia donne au theos son empreinte impériale-curiale. C’est un tel face-à-face (...) entre deux visages de l’alètheia qui est ici dessiné, ou plutôt seulement préparé, où le « Je suis la vérité » sera étudié, dans l’évangile de Jean, à partir de la structure du témoignage, de l’auto-attestation comme accomplissement de la manifestation. (shrink)

Esta contribución plantea una sola pregunta: ¿quién es el Anticristo de Nietzsche? A partir de la figura del Nuevo Testamento en el Evangelio de Juan y las indicaciones apocalípticas en la Segunda Epístola de Pablo a los Tesalonicenses, estudia al Anticristo en el libro de 1888 como una inversión del anatema de Lutero contra Roma y el papado en 1520, ahora vuelto contra el cristianismo mismo. Una lucha tan despiadada tiene el significado de Reino y redención como apuesta única.

This contribution studies the German translations for reality: Realität, Sachheit, Wirklichkeit, first in their own ambiguity, then at the end of the hegelian Objective Logic in The Science of Logi...

La doctrine kierkegaardienne de la vérité expose celle-ci en tant que personnalité, vérité venue dans le monde et toujours personnellement adressée. Mais elle la considère aussi en sa royauté essentielle, selon laquelle l’enseignement de la vérité est, en son centre, annonce de la venue du royaume. La réponse à la vérité est alors le redoublement personnel selon lequel chacun est appelé à suivre la vérité, autrement dit à se tenir dans le combat de l’ ecclesia militans dans le monde et (...) contre le monde, selon l’inconditionnalité du « Tu dois » et la rigueur de l’obéissance, dans le silence de l’écoute. (shrink)

La pensée de Hans Jonas aura partagé avec celles de Hobbes et de Hegel le rôle créateur, inspirateur, qu’elle a fait jouer à la peur. Non pas toute peur. La peur de la mort violente au centre du Hobbes de Leo Strauss (1936) pouvait de loin venir au devant du tremblement de la conscience servile devant la mort, une mort qu’apportait à celle-ci un visage en lequel elle devait reconnaître son maître : le visage du maître aura toujours les traits (...) du Maître absolu. De ce regard dans la mort Alexan... (shrink)

Emmanuel Cattin pursues the problem of what Schürmann calls, throughout his work, the “origin” and seeks to clarify its essential link with language and translation, or with the “originary experience with language”. Drawing on the legacy of Heidegger’s Ereignis, Schürmann never ceased to meditate on the meaning of the source of every appearance, and the mode of dwelling that is in accordance with it, namely “errancy”. Between Maître Eckhart (1972) and Broken Hegemonies (1996), the “errant joy” disappeared, yielding (...) to a tragic gaze. (shrink)

Dans ses cours sur la théologie protestante, donnés à Bonn entre 1932 et 1933, Karl Barth engage une confrontation magistrale avec Hegel, la « confiance en soi » de la pensée humaine et « l’événement de la raison » qui sont au centre de cette œuvre. Hegel, mieux que les théologiens, fut aussi le penseur de la majesté, de la seigneurie de Dieu, mais il ne conçut pas, au centre de la vérité, « l’inconcevable de Dieu ».

Le Stern der Erlösung se tient, à l’égard de l’idéalisme, dans une situation étrange : il le renverse dans sa propre langue. Alors même que tout l’enseignement du livre, se confiant à la langue, s’oppose à l’idéalisme en lequel s’accomplit la philosophie, il trouve dans Schelling, mais aussi dans Hegel, les concepts de son dépassement. Ainsi de la pensée de la Création, retournant la langue hégélienne contre elle-même.

La situation doit indiquer le site ou le lieu. Elle doit le montrer (in den Ort weisen), mais elle demandera aussi, selon Heidegger, qui en fut le penseur, que l’on se rende attentif à lui (den Ort beachten). Alors seulement la situation ouvre la question du domaine ou de la contrée, Gegend, « à laquelle appartient le site ». Alors la situation « médite le site », bedenkt den Ort. Une « situation » de la logique hégélienne devrait elle aussi, (...) quelle que soit l’ampleur du regard dont elle ser... (shrink)

This contribution studies the thing in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, its strange mode of presence, its consistency and disparition by itself, its confusion. The concept of property or quality is...

resumo O presente trabalho é uma contribuição ao estudo do sentido da « personalidade pura », que surge ao final da Ciência de Lógica de Hegel, e que é ali o nome correto e último do « Conceito ». Com esse nome, Hegel pretende designar a afirmação da liberdade em sua ide nt ida de com a negatividade absoluta. Pa ra esclarecer esse ponto, será preciso, primeiro, explicar o sentido hegeliano de pessoa no campo do espírito objetivo, onde ela é (...) alçada, na figurado imperador, à condição de « pessoa absoluta » . No entanto, para além da rigidez desta última, a pessoa hegeliana é o nome do sujeito que decide. Tal decisão é pensada por Hegel como uma criação, a personalidade é precisamente a identidade da vontade e da inteligência, e é possível então passar da sua aparência objetiva à decisão da Id é ia absoluta em sua própria afirmação como conhecimento absoluto, isto é, à identidade he geliana da verda de substancial e do sujeito pessoal. palavras-chave Personalidade pura; sujeito; negatividade; Hegel; Ciência da Lógica. (shrink)

Le probleme theologico-politique comprend une diversite de questions qui trouvent cependant leur unite dans la necessite, ou la contrainte, dont la philosophie dans son histoire ne s'est pas defaite: celle de se confronter au religieux, a l'ecclesial et au theologique. Cette confrontation du philosophique et du religieux emprunte plusieurs voies, selon qu'il s'agit pour la philosophie d'examiner la fondation religieuse du politique et plus generalement les relations du pouvoir et du sacre, ou bien de recommander ou de contester l'usage politique (...) du religieux, ou encore d'affirmer la liberte de la croyance contre toute censure. Les etudes ici reunies portent sur les pythagoriciens, Thomas d'Aquin, Jacques 1er d'Angleterre, Milton, Spinoza, Bayle, Toland, Hume, Kant et Rosenzweig, et proposent une perspective traversiere sur les transformations d'une question qui, tout en etant encore la notre, est indissociable d'une histoire. (shrink)

As Emmanuel Levinas states in the preface to Existence and Existents, "this study is a preparatory one. It examines . . . the problem of the Good, time, and the relationship with the other [person] as a movement toward the Good." First published in 1947, and written mostly during Levinas's imprisonment during World War II, this work provides the first sketch of his mature thought later developed fully in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. This (...) new edition marks the first time this important work has been made available in an inexpensive paperback edition. Levinas's project in Existence and Existents is to move from anonymous existence to the emergence of subjectivity; to subjectivity's practice, theory and morality; to its encounter with the alterity of the other person. He is concerned here primarily with the time of the solitary subject; time is the inner structure of subjectivity, of the movement of existing. "Levinas's work," says Alphonso Lingis, "contains not only wholly new analyses of the forms of time of the present, the past, the future but also a new conception of the work of time." Beginning with Existence and Existents, then, it is possible to begin tracing the progressive "alterization" of time as it unfolds across the development of Levinas's entire philosophy. As a "preparatory" study, Existence and Existents introduces the major themes and concerns that occupied Levinas throughout his career. This is essential reading for understanding both Levinas's own philosophy and the developments in philosophical thought in the twentieth century. (shrink)

La question de Dieu dans la pensée de Husserl fut très tôt un objet d'attention pour la recherche phénoménologique, mais la diversité des textes est telle qu'il était nécessaire d'établir le dossier historique relatif à cette question. Bien évidemment, la mise en lumière de l'unité et de la continuité des analyses de Husserl sur Dieu est animée par une interrogation proprement spéculative : quelle place pour Dieu dans une philosophie descriptive qui se veut méthodologiquement athée? A partir du "je" transcendantal, (...) quel est l'accès possible à la pure phénoménalité de Dieu? Si Husserl décrit la transcendance de Dieu comme celle d'une Idée théorique, éthique et téléologique, il ne s'agit pas pour lui de s'en tenir aux reconstructions abstraites de la métaphysique, niais de revenir à l'expérience originaire de Dieu. La réduction phénoménologique ne demande pas de cesser de croire, mais elle rend possible une purification éthique de l'expérience religieuse qui permet d'élucider son sens. En cela, tout le projet contemporain d'un concept non ontologique de Dieu est redevable à Husserl d'avoir fait le premier pas décisif en affranchissant de tout en soi " et en montrant que la transcendance de Dieu ne peut être séparée de la vie intentionnelle dans laquelle elle s'annonce. Husserl ne confond pas pour autant philosophie et théologie, et la compréhension de Dieu comme évidence d'une Idée pratique infinie laisse ouverte la possibilité de la Révélation sans vouloir parler pour elle. (shrink)

Suszko’s problem is the problem of finding the minimal number of truth values needed to semantically characterize a syntactic consequence relation. Suszko proved that every Tarskian consequence relation can be characterized using only two truth values. Malinowski showed that this number can equal three if some of Tarski’s structural constraints are relaxed. By so doing, Malinowski introduced a case of so-called mixed consequence, allowing the notion of a designated value to vary between the premises and the conclusions of an argument. (...) In this article we give a more systematic perspective on Suszko’s problem and on mixed consequence. First, we prove general representation theorems relating structural properties of a consequence relation to their semantic interpretation, uncovering the semantic counterpart of substitution-invariance, and establishing that mixed consequence is fundamentally the semantic counterpart of the structural property of monotonicity. We use those theorems to derive maximum-rank results proved recently in a different setting by French and Ripley, as well as by Blasio, Marcos, and Wansing, for logics with various structural properties. We strengthen these results into exact rank results for nonpermeable logics. We discuss the underlying notion of rank, and the associated reduction proposed independently by Scott and Suszko. As emphasized by Suszko, that reduction fails to preserve compositionality in general, meaning that the resulting semantics is no longer truth-functional. We propose a modification of that notion of reduction, allowing us to prove that over compact logics with what we call regular connectives, rank results are maintained even if we request the preservation of truth-functionality and additional semantic properties. (shrink)

The presupposition triggered by an expression E is generally satisfied by information that comes before rather than after E in the sentence or discourse. In Heim’s classic theory (1983), this left-right asymmetry is encoded in the lexical semantics of dynamic connectives and operators. But several recent analyses offer a more nuanced approach, in which presupposition satisfaction has two separate components: a general principle (which varies from theory to theory) specifies under what conditions a presupposition triggered by an expression E is (...) satisfied; and an ‘incremental’ component specifies that the principle must be checked on the basis of information that comes before E. Several researchers take this incremental component to be a processing bias, which can be overcome at some cost. If so, it should be possible, though costly, to satisfy presuppositions ‘symmetrically’, i.e. by taking into account linguistic material that comes both before and after the presupposition trigger. We test this claim with experimental means. Using inferential (and to some extent acceptability) tasks involving the anaphoric trigger aussi (‘too’) in French, we argue that symmetric readings are indeed possible (albeit degraded) in environments involving the connectives if, or, and unless. (shrink)

La philosophie de la nature de l'Encyclopedie des sciences philosophiques fut, jusqu'a une date recente, presque ignoree par les etudes hegeliennes. Hegel s'y serait rendu coupable d'une pretention a concurrencer les sciences positives sur leur propre terrain et a rivaliser avec elles, en revelant a la fois son incomprehension de la scientificite la mieux etablie et la faible rationalite de son propre projet. Une lecture attentive permet de rectifier ces prejuges, en montrant non seulement que Hegel s'y trouve attentif et (...) respectueux du savoir positif de son temps, mais encore qu'il tente d'y definir les modalites d'une collaboration methodologiquement reglee entre philosophie et sciences. En quoi consiste le projet d'une science speculative? En quoi consiste chez Hegel la deduction speculative de la verite? En quoi consiste la comprehension hegelienne du statut et des formes du discours des sciences de la nature? Quelle attitude la speculation doit-elle adopter face aux controverses scientifiques? C'est a ces questions que s'efforce de repondre cet ouvrage. (shrink)

Over the last decade, businesses, policymakers, and researchers alike have advocated the need for value creation through inter-organizational collaboration. Researchers have widely argued that organizations that are engaged in collaborative processes create value. Because researchers have tended to focus on the identification of organizational motivations and on key success factors for collaboration, however, both the nature and processes of value creation in inter-organizational collaboration have yet to be examined. A recent theory by Austin and Seitanidi :726–758, 2012a; Nonprofit Volunt Sect (...) Q 41:929–968, 2012b) has proposed an analytical framework for analyzing value creation in inter-organizational collaboration, based on four types of value. The purpose of this current study is to empirically test this framework, and to provide key pointers for analyzing the nature of value, particularly in relation to learning. Our detailed empirical research is based on a 6-year retrospective case study of an inter-organizational partnership within an international development project for local economic development in Guatemala. The study’s contributions are twofold. First, it provides evidence of the critical path of the creation of diverse types of values in a collaborative process; second, it links the different types of value creation with the types of learning that occur in an inter-organizational process. (shrink)

La théorie critique de la société, telle qu'elle s'est développée dans le cadre de ce qu'on appelle parfois l'école de Francfort, se caractérise notamment par le fait qu'elle donne toute son importance aux dominations et aux conflits dans son analyse du monde contemporain. L'une de ses figures aujourd'hui centrales, Axel Honneth, est aussi l'auteur de la théorie de la reconnaissance sans doute la plus systématique et riche en perspectives théoriques et critiques. C'est de cette théorie qu'Emmanuel Renault part dans (...) cc livre, tout en lui apportant des inflexions justifiées d'une part par l'histoire de la théorie critique, d'autre part par l'analyse du temps présent. L'analyse de l'imbrication de la reconnaissance, de la domination et du conflit demande une approche spécifique : l'apport du pragmatisme américain et les débats sociologiques contemporains, en particulier Dewey et Bourdieu, complètent ici le modèle hégélien et les intuitions de Marx. Quelques exemples choisis parmi des objets souvent délaissés par les sciences sociales la conduite oppositionnelle d'un groupe de punks squatters, le langage protestataire de jeunes de banlieues populaires mettent à l'épreuve la capacité d'analyse de l'approche proposée par l'auteur, celle d'une philosophie sociale conçue comme une hybridation de la philosophie et des sciences sociales. Une contribution d'importance au coeur des débats les plus actuels."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1996) has exerted a profound influence on 20th-century continental philosophy. This anthology, including Levinas's key philosophical texts over a period of more than forty years, provides an ideal introduction to his thought and offers insights into his most innovative ideas. Five of the ten essays presented here appear in English for the first time. An introduction by Adriaan Peperzak outlines Levinas's philosophical development and the basic themes of his writings. Each essay is accompanied by a brief introduction (...) and notes. This collection is an ideal text for students of philosophy concerned with understanding and assessing the work of this major philosopher. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the new millennium, initiatives known as roundtables have been developed to create voluntary sustainability standards for agricultural commodities. Intended to be private and voluntary in nature, these initiatives claim their legitimacy from their ability to ensure the participation of all categories of stakeholders in horizontal participatory and inclusive processes. This article characterizes the political and material instruments employed as the means of formulating agreement and taking a variety of voices into consideration in these arenas. Referring to (...) the specific case of the “Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil”, I undertake a detailed analysis of the tensions relating to different forms of participation, which create a gap between “local minority voices” and international stakeholders—either non-governmental organizations or industries. Local communities and small-scale farmers face difficulties when making their voices heard in the form of debate proposed. Firstly, some participants attempt to re-impose a vertical hierarchical relationship between small-scale farmers or affected communities and company managers/directors in order to deprive the former of their powers of representation and of being able to transform reality. Secondly, the liberalism of interest groups in the roundtable accords value to experts, global knowledge, strategy, and detachment, at the expense of other capabilities of rooted or attached people who come to defend their real lives with a desire to raise critical issues of injustice. In this context, I highlight the capacity of local NGOs to relieve some of those tensions and to help locally affected communities and small-scale farmers introduce public stages for debates, by accommodating other forms of participation apart from the liberal one. By being close to and by restoring their dignity through a specific work of solicitude and care, local NGOs prepare affected people for public speaking. (shrink)

Introduction: Return to the obvious -- Perception -- Language -- Ontology of the visible -- Conclusion: Toward dia-phenomenology.

Albert Lautman,.philosophe, juif, fusillé par les Nazis pour faits de Résistance comme son ami et collègue Jean Cavaillès, a laissé inachevée une œuvre puissante et dont l'influence s'est fait sentir au-delà de son domaine. Lautman est une figure rare : un philosophe souverain, capable de mobiliser les grands noms de la tradition philosophique, de Platon à Heidegger, et suffisamment averti des mathématiques pour proposer une intelligence de leur développement acceptée des savants. Les membres du groupe Bourbaki ont reconnu en Lautman (...) un auteur exposant adéquatement les mathématiques auxquelles ils contribuaient ; Deleuze se réfère à lui de manière élogieuse ; Badiou, Petitot et Salanskis, notamment, lui font écho ou tentent de le prolonger. On examine ici cette œuvre dense, depuis Essai sur les notions de structure et d'existence en mathématiques et Essai sur l'unité des sciences mathématiques dans leur développement actuel aux textes posthumes, Symétrie et dissymétrie en mathématiques et en physique suivi du Problème du temps, après l'avoir située dans son contexte historique-scientifique. On espère ainsi montrer la profondeur et l'actualité d'une pensée singulière, celle d'un grand rationaliste qui était aussi un métaphysicien. (shrink)

For a long time, Gilbert Simondon’s work was known only as either a philosophy restricted to the problem of technology or as an inspirational source for Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. As Simondon’s thinking is now finally in the process of being recognized in its own right as one of the most original philosophies of the twentieth century, this also entails that some critical work needs to be done to disentangle it from an all too hasty identification with Deleuzian categories. (...) While both Simondon and Deleuze have made crucial contributions towards a theory of differential individuation that significantly diverges from other authors associated with French poststructuralism insofar as they insist on the dynamic and vital dimension of difference, they also differ on crucial points. Whereas Simondon sees the process of becoming as transductive amplification, Deleuze theorizes it as intensifying involution, leading to two notably distinct concepts of difference. (shrink)

A number of multi-stakeholder initiatives and commodity roundtables have been created since the 1990s to respond to the growing criticism of agriculture’s environmental and social impacts. Driven by private and global-scale actors, these initiatives are setting global standards for sustainable agricultural practices. They claim to follow the new standard-making virtues of inclusiveness and consensus and base their legitimacy on their claim of balanced representation of, and participation by, all categories of stakeholders. This principle of representing a wide range of interests (...) with a balance of power is at the heart of a new type of action that forms part of a broader political liberal model for building coalitions of interest groups. The intention of this symposium is to assess the nature of processes and outcomes of this model while paying particular attention to the forms of inclusion and exclusion they generate. In this introduction, we highlight the differences in theoretical approaches to analyzing MSIs and the manifestation of power through them. We distinguish between more traditional political–economy approaches and approaches concerned with ideational and normative power, such as convention theory. We discuss some of the main paradoxes of MSIs related to their willingness to be “inclusive” and at the same time their exclusionary or “closure” effects due in part to interactions with existing political economic contexts and embedded power inequalities, as well as more subtle manifestations of power linked to the favoring of some forms of knowledge and engagement over others. (shrink)

Linguists often sharply distinguish the different modules that support linguistics competence, e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics. However, recent work has identified phenomena in syntax (polarity sensitivity) and pragmatics (implicatures), which seem to rely on semantic properties (monotonicity). We propose to investigate these phenomena and their connections as a window into the modularity of our linguistic knowledge. We conducted a series of experiments to gather the relevant syntactic, semantic and pragmatic judgments within a single paradigm. The comparison between these quantitative data leads (...) us to four main results, (i) Our results support a departure from one element of the classical Gricean approach, thus helping to clarify and settle an empirical debate. This first outcome also confirms the soundness of the methodology, as the results align with standard contemporary accounts of scalar implicature (SI), (ii) We confirm that the formal semantic notion of monotonicity underlies negative polarity item (NPI) syntactic acceptability, but (iii) our results indicate that the notion needed is perceived monotonicity. We see results (ii) and (iii) as the main contribution of this study: (ii) provides an empirical interpretation and confirmation of one of the insights of the model-theoretic approach to semantics, while (iii) calls for an incremental, cognitive implementation of the current generalizations, (iv) Finally, our results do not indicate that the relationship between NPI acceptability and monotonicity is mediated by pragmatic features related to Sis: this tells against elegant attempts to unify polarity sensitivity and Sis (pioneered by Krifka and Chierchia). These results illustrate a new methodology for integrating theoretically rigorous work in formal semantics with an experimentally-grounded cognitively-oriented view of linguistic competence. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most important figures of twentieth-century philosophy. Exerting a profound influence upon such thinkers as Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot, and Irigaray, Levinas's work bridges several major gaps in the evolution of continental philosophy--between modern and postmodern, phenomenology and poststructuralism, ethics and ontology. He is credited with having spurred a revitalized interest in ethics-based philosophy throughout Europe and America. _Entre Nous_ (Between Us) is the culmination of Levinas's philosophy. Published in France a few years before his (...) death, it gathers his most important work and reveals the development of his thought over nearly forty years of committed inquiry. Along with several trenchant interviews published here, these essays engage with issues of suffering, love, religion, culture, justice, human rights, and legal theory. Taken together, they constitute a key to Levinas's ideas on the ethical dimensions of otherness. Working from the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Levinas pushed beyond the limits of their framework to argue that it is ethics, not ontology, that orients philosophy, and that responsibility precedes reasoning. Ethics for Levinas means responsibility in relation to difference. Throughout his work, Levinas returns to the metaphor of the face of the other to discuss how and where responsibility enters our lives and makes philosophy necessary. For Levinas, ethics begins with our face to face interaction with another person--seeing that person not as a reflection of one's self, nor as a threat, but as different and greater than self. Levinas moves the reader to recognize the implications of this interaction: our abiding responsibility for the other, and our concern with the other's suffering and death. Situated at the crossroads of several philosophical schools and approaches, Levinas's work illuminates a host of critical issues and has found resonances among students and scholars of literature, law, religion, and politics. _Entre Nous_ is at once the apotheosis of his work and an accessible introduction to it. In the end, Levinas's urgent meditations upon the face of the other suggest a new foundation upon which to grasp the nature of good and evil in the tangled skein of our lives. (shrink)

La réflexion sur le positivisme juridique est au cœur d'interrogations importantes concernant la portée des règles de droit, la nature de l'Etat et les relations entre droit et morale. L'examen des présupposés et des thèses philosophiques de la Théorie pure du droit de Hans Kelsen et du Concept de droit d'Herbert Hart permet de s'orienter dans ces débats. Les deux auteurs proposent des théories distinctes d'une même réalité : la mise en vigueur, dans des collectivités, de règles possédant une forme (...) d'objectivité. Leurs descriptions du fonctionnement des systèmes juridiques obligent à reconduire à ses fondements l'examen de la nature et de la connaissance des normes. De ce fait, la comparaison des doctrines doit permettre de mieux comprendre, en particulier, l'articulation entre le registre du devoir-être et la prise en compte de la réalité de la vie sociale organisée par le droit. (shrink)

Internationally renowned as one of the great French philosophers of the twentieth century, the late Emmanuel Levinas remains a pivotal figure across the humanistic disciplines for his insistence--against the grain of Western philosophical tradition--on the primacy of ethics in philosophical investigation. This first English translation of a series of twelve essays known as _Alterity and Transcendence_ offers a unique glimpse of Levinas defining his own place in the history of philosophy. Published by a mature thinker between 1967 and 1989, (...) these works exhibit a refreshingly accessible perspective that seasoned admirers and newcomers will appreciate. In today's world, where religious conceptions of exalted higher powers are constantly called into question by theoretical investigation and by the powerful influence of science and technology on our understanding of the universe, has the notion of transcendence been stripped of its significance? In Levinas's incisive model, transcendence is indeed alive--not in any notion of our relationship to a mysterious, sacred realm but in the idea of our worldly, subjective relationships to others. Without presupposing an intimate knowledge of the history of philosophy, Levinas explores the ways in which Plotinus, Descartes, Husserl, and Heidegger have encountered the question of transcendence. In discourses on the concepts of totality and infinity, he locates his own thinking in the context of pre-Socratic philosophers, Aristotle, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, and Descartes. Always centering his discussions on the idea of interpersonal relations as the basis of transcendence, Levinas reflects on the rights of individuals (and how they are inextricably linked to those of others), the concept of peace, and the dialogic nature of philosophy. Finally, in interviews conducted by Christian Chabanis and Angelo Bianchi, Levinas responds to key questions not directly addressed in his writings. Throughout, _Alterity and Transcendence_ reveals a commitment to ethics as first philosophy--obliging modern thinkers to investigate not merely the true but the good. (shrink)

This book starts off from a philosophical premise: nobody can be in the world unless they are born into the world.