Emmanuel Levinas

About the author

Born in Kaunas in 1906 to a Lithuanian Jewish family, Emmanuel Levinas became one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century French philosophy. Working across Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, he made ethics his central preoccupation — insisting that the relationship to the other person precedes and grounds all questions of metaphysics and ontology. That radical repositioning of ethics gave his thought an enduring influence well beyond academic philosophy.

He died in Clichy on 25 December 1995.