Original scientific paper
Ethics as Prima Philosophia: Elements of the Philosophical Thought by Emmanuel Levinas
Goran Gretić
; Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Emmanuel Levinas’s thought poses a great challenge and provocation, because it is a matter of a completely distinctive attempt of criticism of the ontotheological tradition of Western thought, through an entirely peculiar interlacement of the Old-Testament, Talmud wisdom and the Logos tradition of the West. The explicit intention of Levinas’s thought, and this primarily in immanent confrontation with M. Heidegger’s thought, is the foundation and establishment of the primacy of ethics over ontology, and in this sense the establishment of a new metaphysics, i.e. the establishment of a specific relationship between the Self and the Other as an epiphany of the face. This ethical relationship, which is essentially asymmetrical, shows itself as a basis of the infinite responsibility of the Self for the Other; indeed, the recognition of the Other and solidarity, the brotherhood of man and among peoples, freedom and justice, exactly in the specified order, arise from this very relationship of responsibility.
Keywords
Philosophy and Biblical wisdom; primacy of ethics over ontology; ethics and metaphysics; ethics of resistance; ethics as a relationship toward the Other
Hrčak ID:
151767
URI
Publication date:
5.4.2010.
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