Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas was a Lithuanian-born French philosopher who reoriented phenomenology around the encounter with the other person. Having survived the Holocaust while his family perished, he argued that ethics—the responsibility imposed by the face of the other—is first philosophy, prior to ontology and epistemology. The face of another places an infinite demand upon us that we can never fully discharge.

In Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, Levinas developed a painstaking phenomenology of alterity, arguing that Western philosophy had systematically attempted to reduce the other to the same—to assimilate what is genuinely foreign into familiar categories. His work has been enormously influential on continental philosophy, Jewish theology, and political thought, particularly in relation to hospitality, responsibility, and the ethics of the stranger.