Description
Book SynopsisAn interpretation of the ethical and religious dimensions of Levinas' thought. Placing Levinas in relation to Hegel and Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, and Derrida and Marion, it develops the religious themes found in Levinas' work and offers a way to think and speak about ethics and morality within the horizons of philosophy of religion.
Trade ReviewReaders will find Jeffrey Kosky's book a helpful addition to the secondary material on Levinas. Attention to Levinas continues to increase as do the quality and number of secondary pieces interpreting his work. In keeping with the writings of John Caputo and Dennis Keenan, Kosky (independent scholar) presents Levinas as a phenomenologist who engages religious subjects without denying the important shift beyond ontotheology made by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Kosky focuses on responsibility as the key to unlocking the religious possibilities within Levinas. This insight is not new, but it bears repeating. Kosky concludes his text by showing that Levinas's religion is rooted in undecidability. One knows not of what one speaks, when one speaks of God. This insight is as refreshing now as it was when Augustine stated it in the first book of the Confessions. Kosky does an excellent job of drawing our attention to Levinas as one of the great 20th-century thinkers who refuses to deny God while simultaneously refusing to claim to know anything about God. Graduate students and scholars of Levinas, as well as those in the area of the philosophy of religion, should read this text.September 2002
-- D. J. Livingston * Mercyhurst College *
Table of ContentsPreliminary Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part 1: Beyond Totality and Infinity
1. Ethics as the End of Metaphysics
2. Theology and the Unthought Constitution of Ethical Metaphysics
3. Reduction to Responsibility
Part 2: Ethical Phenomenology
4. Insight and Drift: Husserl
5. The De-posited Subject: Levinas
6. The Affected Subject: Responsibility or Dasein?
Part 3: Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion
7. The Death of God and Emergence of the Philosophy of Religion
8. Ethical Phenomenology and the Religiosity of the Subject
9. The Ethical Possibility of God
Notes
Works Cited
Index
