Abstract

Recalling the Greek origins of philosophy and its attachment to science as universal knowledge: “thinking and being are one”. Contrast with the challenge of Levinas’ conception of philosophy as significance of signification via encounter with irreducible alterity of the vulnerable other person through moral responsibility. Challenge to science as first philosophy by ethics – morality and justice – as first philosophy. The intelligibility of the latter explicated in terms of the “saying” of the “said”, i.e., the origination of meaning in the moral communication situation of the face-to-face. Thus science, knowledge, truth, unable to ground themselves by themselves, receive grounding – justification – in ethics.