Abstract

This article addresses the many ways the philosophies of the later Heidegger and the later Levinas speak to us in the time of the coronavirus pandemic. I argue that the pause in the world’s busy industrial life provides an ideal opportunity for what Heidegger called meditative thinking. The pandemic is also a time both of extreme bodily vulnerability and of extraordinary ethical responsibility for others, and so causes us to hear Levinas’ extreme language in Otherwise than Being about anarchic ethical responsibility and the self as a hostage in a very different way.