A disciple of Husserl and Heidegger, a contemporary of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Levinas entirely renewed the way of thinking ethics in our times. In contrast to the whole tradition of Western philosophy, he considered ethics neither as an aspiration to individual perfection, nor as the highest branch in the Cartesian tree of knowledge, but as "first philosophy." By putting into question the priority of Being, by seeing responsibility for the other person as the very structure of subjectivity, Levinas initiated a new understanding of time, freedom or language. This book is a collection of...