Emmanuel Lévinas

Article abstract: With the claim that ethics, rather than ontology, is “first philosophy,” Lévinas launched a major critique of the Western philosophical tradition, suggesting that philosophy is finally the wisdom of love in the service of love.

Early Life

Through his early education, Emmanuel Lévinas was thoroughly steeped in Russian culture and Jewish orthodoxy. He read, in Russian, the great novelists Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevski, and Leo Tolstoy, and the Bible in Hebrew. In 1923, Lévinas left Lithuania (a few...

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