Abstract

For Levinas, there isn’t any place for other and also for ethics and responsibility in the Western Metaphysics which based on the relation with being and takes ontology as the first philosophy. Ethics can find only an accidental place for itself in the system of philosophy which the ‘other’ has no room in it. Also, this is the violence of ontology. In this context, a question, “Why Ethics?”, can be asked from the ontological based philosophy. Levinas’ thougt will be the answer for this kind of question. In this paper, the possibilities of ethics as first philosophy will be investigated in the context of the Levinas’ concepts, transcendence and height.